Automation ensures mail always gets through

New Zealand Post is nearing the end of an $80-million five-year technology upgrade to its metropolitan mail centres. Kevin Kevany reviews progress.
New Zealand Post needs to boost efficiency and cope with potential rapid growth. So back in 2005, it began replacing old mail processing technology with 22 state-of-the-art bar-coding and sorting machines.
The first of the new machines was installed in the Wellington mail centre in early 2006, with the balance rolling out in Dunedin, Palmerston North, Hamilton, Christchurch and finally Auckland.
When the project was launched, the chief operating officer of the Postal Services Group, at the time, Peter Fenton, said the new technology would result in a significant decrease in manual handling. At that time, less than 40 percent of New Zealand mail was machine-processed; in Europe the average was 80 per cent.
The contract was awarded to NEC, which has supplied more than 300 hopper feeder, facer canceller machines to more than 40 countries and regions.
Engineering services manager, Edwin Boyce, who is in charge of the project, says, “We are just starting the installation out at Highbrook, East Tamaki, between Auckland and Manukau City. Each site so far has tended to be different, so it is difficult to put a precise date on when this last stage of the project will be complete, but we are looking at being fully-operational by April 2008. Christchurch is installed and we are going through a testing phase to ensure a fit between the machine and the type of mail we have in that city.” 
The new system is targeted primarily at ‘internal efficiencies’, with 100 fewer processing employees needed at the Wellington mail centre in the 12-months to February 2007. Proportional numbers of redundancies have occurred at other centres.

Advanced multi-purpose machine
The selected NEC CFC NS-A series – which comprises a hopper feeder; culler section; facer canceller and a system console – is described as an advanced, multi-purpose machine that automates the mail-preparation stage of mail-sorting operations. It first culls non-machinable mail from mixed postal items loaded by operators. The postage on the mail is then cancelled with a postmark indicating the post office name and cancelling date, and the mail is faced in accordance with the location of the postage. Finally, the mail is moved into stackers corresponding to a range of mail types, such as ordinary mail, fast mail, bar-coded mail or metered mail – and other local and overseas destinations.
NEC developed its first automated mail processing system in 1961 and today it is one of the world’s leading suppliers of automated mail processing systems. Its systems are intended to integrate the latest advances in electronics and ‘mechatronics’ and include such breakthroughs as the world’s first OCR/video coding system / letter sorting machine, able to read not only handwritten Chinese/Japanese addresses, but also handwritten English/Portuguese addresses.
Its ‘e-logistics’ system automates sorting operations for delivery, as well as allowing users to monitor all the processes from collection to sort, delivery and arrival. It can be utilised to provide a full track of any item.

Outside the square
Even with the new machines, any item larger than an A4 folded in half is “culled” and has to be manually processed. Anything thicker than 6mm drops through a ‘vein’ in the drum, fed by conveyor from a hopper into which all items are placed at the outset. Likewise anything square – the machine has difficulty in determining “which way is up” – or out of spec in any other way is removed. Stiffness is an issue too.
A series of suction belts segregates the mail.
“If you can imagine a series of envelopes sitting in a deck formation and you have to take them away one at a time. The suction comes on, lifts an item, moves it along, and so forth. And all of this is taking place while they travel at three-point-three metres a second, or some 11 kilometres an hour,” adds Boyce.

Ultimate stage
At the ultimate stage, the mail passes a ‘colour indicia’ which picks out stamps, ‘fast’ stickers and any other embellishment like an ASM (automatic stamping machine; née “franking machine” and mostly known today as ‘meter marks’) mark. ‘Fast Post’ stickers have the item fast-tracked to another part of the system for speedier processing.
When the mailed item reaches the ‘switchback’, a “shunting exercise takes place” and it is ‘faced’ or aligned with the stamped edge in the correct position. NZ Post currently uses fluorescent or phosphorous detection. The stamps have phosphorous printed into them and this is ‘recognised’. An ink-jet printer sprays the ‘cancellation’ mark onto the stamp, assuming it finds one in the correct position.
“That said, NZ Post can process anything that comes at us – we just cannot run it through the machine,” notes Boyce, who is an Eaton Corporation veteran and a former Air Force education officer.

Where to next?
Now the item is “legitimised” (if you like) it now proceeds to an optical character reader (OCR) where the address is ascertained and it works out where to send it to next. A signal from the OCR to the bar-coder tells it which code to emboss. That sends it to one of 24 stackers which segregate the mail by type and any possible destination in the world.
Well not quite. Mail will either stay in the major city it is in (it will go through a ‘finer sort’ at this point); go to one of the other five major centres; or, if it is destined for abroad, go to the International Mail Centre at Auckland Airport.
The mind boggles at how this was ever done virtually overnight, when the process was fully manual – but volumes were much lower then than they are now.
Boyce remains confident that after full implementation of the project next year, NZ Post will have reached its goal of 75-80 per cent of mail being handled “to the round” (the postie) by the automation process.
“We have been fortunate in that nothing unforeseen has come along to trip is up – at least to date – and the team we set up to work with NEC has found them most co-operative too. At the outset we all sat down together and worked out what we wanted to achieve, so that it didn’t turn into a case of ‘we want machines: when can they be delivered?’  It’s been a united team for three to four years now,” says Boyce, who joined NZ Post last year.
April 2008 will hopefully be a “Read Letter Day” in both senses of the phrase.