NZ Post upgrade costs NZD80m

NEW ZEALAND POST is spending $80 million in the next six years to dramatically improve mail sorting.

The Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU) is working closely with NZ Post and expects it to result in fewer jobs for part-time workers.

But EPMU secretary Andrew Little said the jobs left would be more skilled and satisfying.

NZ Post chief operating officer Peter Fenton confirmed there would be “significant employee changes over the next five years.”

He said it was too early to tell how staffing levels would change because new technology would need to be bedded in and staff kept on till it worked properly.

NZ Post will spend $35 million on new technology to automate metro mail centres. Wellington’s mail sorting centre at Petone will be first to get new sorting machines, next February.

Metro mail centres will each get two machines, one to read the mail and apply a barcode and the other to read the barcode and give the mail a destination.

The new machines will be much more accurate, but not much faster, than the old machines.

Palmerston North will get the new technology in the middle of next year.

By the end of 2006 Hamilton and Christchurch will have new buildings and machines and Dunedin will be automated for the first time.

Auckland’s two centres will merge into one by late 2007.

The roles of regional processing centres in Nelson, New Plymouth, Napier, Gisborne, Rotorua, Invercargill, Tauranga and Whangarei will change. The regional centres will still process mail that cannot be read by machine, including packages and parcels, but will no longer handle letters.

Outdated technology and wrongly addressed mail mean nearly 40 per cent of machine-sorted mail has to be re-sorted by hand.

Improved addressing standards and a wider range of postcodes will be introduced to make sure machines can read addresses.

New address standards will be accompanied by a two-year education campaign.

The four-digit address code will be retained, and new levels of accuracy added.

Each of Wellington’s five Hui Sts will, for example, get their own bar code, allowing NZ Post to tell them apart for the first time.

Only 40 per cent of New Zealand mail is sorted automatically, compared with an average of 80 per cent in Europe.

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