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.
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