Swiss Post improve speed with Pinesoft

Swiss Post has improved the speed of its mail bagging process after requesting help from Pinesoft. After a year in development, the logistic software development teams at Pinesoft created MBagger, a unique stand-alone system to improve the mail bagging and mail consolidation process.

The duplication of an address label is a common task in re-mailing and is often performed by manually copying the label, which can be time consuming and prone to errors. One alternative to rewriting the address information is to scan the original label and print a duplicate image using a thermal label printer.

This can require many attempts to obtain a readable label as the original may be poorly printed, damaged or covered with polythene and the environment where the scanning takes place is typically not well lit.

Swiss Post asked Pinesoft to develop an alternative. Dr Stephen Dakin, managing director at Pinesoft, said: “The remit was that it had to rapidly scan, clean up and print even the most poorly printed or hand written address labels (such as impact printers with old ribbons, coloured backgrounds, low-contrast images, bad or faint handwriting) and do so under all realistically possible lighting conditions to counter uneven illumination in the warehouse”.

Pinesoft state their team “experimented with all aspects of thresholding, and after much experimentation, developed an impressive, configurable way to let the software actively seek out and clean up text in the source image and produce a text only, clearly readable facsimile”.

MBagger is now in use at Swiss Post.

Mark Smith, revenue protection and quality manager at Swiss Post, said: “This is a fantastic piece of equipment which prints a readable address every time. Dramatic efficiencies in our mail bagging operation, providing significant savings in the process which in turn led to increased competitiveness in the service offering.”