Amplify Memphis Day Four: FedEx Sends It Out to the World

This entry was written by Parker Ruffin (’18).  

At the beginning of the day, the class went to the FedEx Cold Chain Center. The Cold Chain Center’s purpose for FedEx is to make sure certain goods, usually medication or healthcare materials, are at cooler temperatures than other items that pass through the FedEx hub. We as a class then got to get a debriefing on the CCC and find out many things about both this new innovation and the company of FedEx.

We were able to achieve an understanding on the humongous size of the company. FedEx serves 220 nations worldwide while shipping 1.4 million packages a day in Memphis, 4 million packages globally a day, and processing over 110,000 packages an hour at the sorting hub. Not to mention the fact that there are 657 FedEx planes traveling to 375 global airports! After the debriefing, we were given a tour of the CCC. Security was tight and pictures were NOT allowed.  We were able to see the warehouse were all of the cold packages go through. Next we got to see and experience all of the refrigerators inside the building with the warmest being 75 degrees Fahrenheit to the coldest being -13 degrees Fahrenheit!

After the tour, we went to LYFE Kitchen which is a new restaurant chain, that relocated its headquarters from California to Memphis, that enables people to eat good, healthy food that is prepared quickly and for a great price.

After the very good lunch, our next stop was to see the Global Operations Control Center for FedEx. We began the tour by understanding what exactly happens here in the “War Room.” The GOCC is in charge of flight dispatch and service recovery for FedEx and is a key part in the system to make sure everything is going well. After leaving the War Room, we got to see actual people working and got to see exactly what was going on . Many of the rooms had large maps on the wall where we were able to understand and see how complex and interesting their work is here (above). We also got a chance to see how many places were flying in the United States at the moment were there (below, left).

Scenes from the FedEx “War Room”

I enjoyed this day very much and it is one of the most interesting things to see in Memphis.