Aliso Viejo UPS Center Delivers on Efficiency : Work force: Its 180 drivers are backed up by sorters who process packages twice daily. Expansion is possible.

Like a long, brown serpent, a line of delivery trucks snakes down the hill every weekday morning from the United Parcel Service processing center in Aliso Viejo.

About 180 drivers hit the road to pick up and deliver about 1 million pounds of packages a day from Costa Mesa to San Clemente.

“It has won service awards for being the most efficient. It’s one of the better facilities in the district,” said UPS District Manager Oscar Joffrion, who manages nine centers in Southern California and southern Arizona.

The sprawling, 5-year-old plant is also one of the company’s most beautiful. The center was given special landscaping to make it more eye-pleasing to residents who look down on it from further up the hill. And, like all UPS facilities, it was built for maximum productivity.

An army of part-time workers, many of them college students, sort packages in the mornings and evenings. The morning crew directs packages to conveyor belts for various parts of Orange County. Another worker, in turn, then directs the packages to the correct truck. That way, the trucks are loaded and ready to go when the drivers arrive, Joffrion said.

In the evening, the process works roughly in reverse. Workers load packages destined for air delivery onto tractor-trailer trucks. Packages bound for inside California are sent to Ontario International Airport. Those going to the East are hauled to Long Beach Airport.

As busy as the operation is, UPS recognizes that it will probably have to expand as South County grows. “We have room to expand,” Joffrion said.