Shipping Company OnTrac Opens 160,000 Square-Foot Facility to Keep Up With E-Commerce Boom
Booming online sales aren’t lifting up just Amazon and an army of freelance drivers. It’s also a boon for delivery companies.
Shipping and receiving company OnTrac cut the ribbon on a new 160,000-square-foot facility in Vancouver, Wash., on Aug. 24, giving it room to grow while online shopping shows no signs of slowing.
“Oh my gosh, business has been going very well,” said Laura Peterson, vice president of marketing. “You know, we were lucky. The rise of e-commerce sort of timed with the big downturn in the economy in 2009 to 2010, so it was very helpful for us because that was really when we started delivering for some very large e-commerce companies.”
Statistics weren’t immediately available on how the company has grown in recent years. Peterson said the company has been adding facilities along its territory in the western United States — and it has quickly outgrown them.
“We’ve found we’re having a lot of difficulty keeping up with the growth because we’d go into a new facility based on the volume we had and we’d immediately outgrow it,” she said.
Peterson also noted they no longer build for the amount of deliveries they handle currently, but rather “the volume we expect for tomorrow.”
That’s not too surprising given the climb of online retail sales in the United States. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, such sales hit $111.5 billion in the second quarter of 2017 — up 4% from first quarter and 16.2% from second quarter last year.
The rise has been great for the big logistics companies such as UPS and FedEx, who are posting rising profits and record numbers of deliveries.
Likewise, OnTrac expects its new Clark County facility to meet a rising tide of packages. The facility has 35 dock doors, an upgrade from 13 at its previous location. It allows 4,000 packages per hour to travel through its terminal and could ratchet that up to 7,000 as they expand.
OnTrac first arrived in Clark County in 2005 and has roughly 60 employees here, according to company representatives.
Peterson added they do plan to hire a few more full-time employees soon, and will ratchet up their workforce for its peak delivery season during the holidays.
Founded in 1991, OnTrac has more than 2,700 employees companywide.
