hi Everyone,
I thought you might enjoy this NPR article on the supply chain resources 
Santa needs to deliver his goods—UPS and FedEx provide their input.  Happy 
Holidays!  Jocelyn Jones, FHWA Resource Center
 
 
Without Magic, Santa Would Need 12 Million Employees
Lam Thuy Vo / NPR
Published: December 19, 2012
http://m.npr.org/news/front/93559255?textSize=large&url=%2Fblogs%
2Fmoney%2F
 
by Chana Joffe-Walt
 
There are 760 million Christian children in the world, according to the Pew 
Research Center. Suppose Santa delivers one gift to each child. What kind of 
delivery workforce would Santa need?
 
We couldn't get an interview with Santa. But we did get Paul Tronsor from 
FedEx and Mike Mangeot from UPS. They helped us go through the numbers.
 
Here are just a few of the positions Santa would need to fill to pull off 
Christmas. (Note: For the complete list, see the graphic at the bottom.)
 
* 46 international distribution centers, to allow Santa to reload as he crosses 
the globe. That means 400,000 workers for loading presents onto Santa's 
sleigh.
 
* 60,000 workers to develop optimized flight plans and communicate with the 
FAA, secure flyover rights, etc.
 
* 7,000 people monitoring demand and tweaking his route in real time.
 
* 100 meteorologists to make sure Santa doesn't fly into a blizzard.
 
* 40,000 people to help Santa clear customs.
 
To give you a sense of how big that team is, that's 40 times the number of 
employees at FedEx:
 
Mike from UPS can think through all those teams and all those workers, but 
there's still something that's a mystery for him: the sleigh. Not only does it 
have to move fast enough to deliver 9,000 presents a second, but estimating 
conservatively that each present weighs about a pound, Mike says it would 
have to haul 760 million pounds of cargo. Which would take nearly three 
hundred 747 planes to haul. Or perhaps just nine reindeer.
 
This is what the whole workforce looks like: [Copyright 2012 National Public 
Radio]
 
TRANSCRIPT:
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
 
It's Christmastime and kids everywhere are writing letters to Santa Claus. One 
particular letter got us thinking. It's from Lucy Drummond(ph), daughter of the 
senior national editor here at NPR News, Steve Drummond.
 
LUCY DRUMMOND: (Reading) Dear Santa, I hope you and Mrs. Claus are well. I 
think you are so kind but I have one question: How do you do it? Oh, by the 
way, you have a good sense of sight. Love, Lucy.
 
SIEGEL: How, indeed. How does Santa deliver presents to hundreds of 
thousands of children in a single night?
 
Well, as a public service to children everywhere, whoever wondered about this 
same question, Chana Joffe-Walt of NPR's Planet Money tried to find an 
answer.
 
CHANA JOFFE-WALT, BYLINE: Santa doesn't do interviews but there are two 
men who consider themselves sort of colleagues of Santa's, two men who 
believe they have a good sense of how exactly he does it. Here's the first, 
Paul Tronsor from FedEx.
 
PAUL TRONSOR: It's really about international business because, after all, 
that's what Santa really is doing here is a massive international operations, 
just like FedEx.
 
JOFFE-WALT: I spent a while talking to Paul from FedEx and a guy named Mike 
Mangeot from UPS about Santa. And the first thing we have to do is lay out 
some numbers. So, according to Pew Research Center, there are 760 million 
Christian children in the world. For the sake of simplicity, let's say each child 
gets one present. We know there's only one Santa to deliver those presents. 
We know he travels on a sleigh of undetermined size. And he has about 24 
hours to get all the presents to all the kids.
 
Here's Mike with UPS.
 
MIKE MANGEOT: If you have to deliver to 760 million customers in a night, we 
kind of put that through a UPS prism to see what that would mean.
 
JOFFE-WALT: Mike says what you'd need to start is an international 
distribution center, like UPS has.
 
MANGEOT: That facility is 5.2 million square feet. It has 155 miles of conveyor 
belts and it employs about 9,000 people.
 
JOFFE-WALT: UPS has one of these. Santa, he says, would need 46 located 
all over the world, so he could fly by and replenish his supply throughout the 
night. Each one of those employs 9,000 people, so that's about 400,000 
employees worldwide just to load presents on to Santa's sleigh.
 
And then there's planning Santa's flight route. Paul, the FedEx guy, says 
that's also a pretty big department.
 
TRONSOR: So, let's presume he wants to deliver packages in Florida, for 
example. He would not fly from the North Pole to Florida, 'cause there's a 
hundred million kids in between. He would develop an optimize to get him from 
the North Pole and make the most efficient stop, stop, stop, stop, stop all the 
way across the globe.
 
JOFFE-WALT: When Paul says he, he's not talking about Santa. He means 
60,000 staff people. Another 100 people would file Santa's flight plan with the 
FAA ahead of time. Once Santa is in the air, you've got about 7,000 people 
tweaking his route in real time. Add to that a hundred meteorologists to make 
sure Santa doesn't, you know, fly into a blizzard.
 
UPS and FedEx ran these numbers, by the way, they're not just making them 
up.
 
So were close to half a million people so far. Double that, Mike the UPS guy 
says, because for this whole thing to work you'd need a ton of support staff.
 
MANGEOT: Whether it would be human resources, finance and accounting, 
network planning, regulatory compliance.
 
JOFFE-WALT: Regulatory compliance alone, that's huge.
 
MANGEOT: You can't just fly into a country. You have to get permissions to 
do that.
 
JOFFE-WALT: You need 100 people to secure fly-over rights and landing rights 
in every country Santa flies into.
 
And you can't just bring anything you want into each country, you have to 
clear customs. Paul, with FedEx, says Santa would need a staff of people who 
know everything about every country's rules, to make sure Santa will clear 
customs ahead of time.
 
TRONSOR: That is the custom liaison's mission.
 
JOFFE-WALT: So Santa needs how many people to do that?
 
TRONSOR: Probably about 40,000 people. Santa needs about 40,000 custom 
liaison people.
 
JOFFE-WALT: You need drivers and pilots to get the presents from the North 
Pole to the distribution centers. It goes on and on. And for a grand total of 
how many people it would take to pull this operation off, Paul looks at how 
many people FedEx needs for one very busy day, compares it to Santa's 760 
million customers, and he thinks...
 
TRONSOR: Santa is the head of this huge organization, so we expect that 
Santa would need about 12 million people.
 
JOFFE-WALT: So, Santa Inc. is 12 million employees.
 
TRONSOR: Santa Inc. is 12 million. It is massive. I don't know of any company 
that has the number of employees that Santa does.
 
JOFFE-WALT: These two guys, with FedEx and UPS, can look at their own 
businesses and figure out a lot about Santa's operation. But Santa does have 
certain trade secrets that are his alone. For Mike, with UPS, the biggest 
question he has about Santa's operations is that sleigh. Not only does it have 
to move fast, delivering almost 9,000 presents per second, but it's also 
carrying a huge amount of weight.
 
MANGEOT: Santa's sled has to be absolutely ginormous. If you assume 
conservatively that each of these 760 million children get a present that 
weighs one pound, that's 760 million pounds, which would take 295 747 
aircraft to haul. Interestingly, that's about 50 more 747s than exists in the 
entire world. So that's - these reindeer are doing something really impressive 
on Christmas Night.
 
JOFFE-WALT: In the end, Mike and Paul both say they believe with 12 million 
people, about $10 billion and lots of technology, Santa's task does seem 
feasible. The remaining questions they have they just chalk up to Santa's main 
competitive advantage: Magic.
 
Chana Joffe-Walt, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National 
Public Radio.