Canpar opens Montreal regional operations hub

Marking the most significant upgrade to its operational capabilities in 20 years, Canpar officially opened an 123,000 sq ft regional operations hub in Lachine, Quebec on June 3.

The facility has 11 inbound and 28 outbound docks, room inside for 90 local delivery trucks at a time and a normal system capacity of 11,000 parcels per hour.

The facility, says Canpar’s Vice President of Sales and Marketing Robert Tersigni, "includes a computerised parcel-sorting conveyor system to maximize flow-through, individual package carriers that will virtually eliminate damages, a series of bar-code reading scanners to maximize shipment visibility/routing and the latest advances in security systems to ensure package safety."

Power extendable unloaders get parcels to the main sorter, a computer-controller Sandvik Md2D machine. A state-of-the-art computerized sorting system sorts the freight to the appropriate outbound doors. The system is so advanced, says Alan Bedard, the president and CEO of TransForce, a holding company that purchased Canpar in late May, it is serving as a research and development centre for a similar hub that is planned for Toronto in 2004.