Secured Mail invest in process automation
Secured Mail, has made a £multi-million investment in process automation.
The first mail company to use the XL Slide Tray Sorter in the UK, Secured Mail has invested in new multi-function machinery to speed up and streamline operations at its two processing Hubs – Warrington and its new Hub in Luton.
Highlighting the key features of the new tray sorting system, Operations Director for Secured Mail, James Wilkins, said: “The XL Tray Sorter is a versatile and highly flexible operating platform. With the ability to recognise multiple bar codes, it sorts letters and packets allowing items to be recorded and sorted quickly and efficiently. This is a configurable sort machine, and will provide a 360-degree audit process giving us far more visibility of items as they pass through our network. In particular, it will increase our speed for sorting bulk mail, increasing capacity, generating greater efficiency and higher productivity rates. Being scalable, the XL Tray Sorter is also able to deal effectively not only with our current workload, but can be easily modified to accommodate future requirements – vital to support Secured Mail’s significant growth in its e-commerce business.
The new equipment will also prove invaluable as a packet and e-commerce sortation machine during our peak periods, dealing with the seasonal volumes which have a significant impact on our business.”
James Wilkins added: “This investment continues our growth in the e-commerce sector working alongside one of our major automation partners – Equinox MHE.”
Part of this latest investment in automation by Secured Mail has also been directed towards providing automated barcoding and revenue protection equipment. “This is to verify the weight, volume and format of customer consignments,” explains James Wilkins, “and is primarily in response to customer feedback requesting a system that can track parcels throughout our network. We have created a dynamic system solution which is of particular relevance to customers who need to mail daily consignments of between 500 to1,000 packets without the need to integrate their Warehouse Management Systems or data streams. The equipment will enable us to trace each item through the network to the point of handover to our delivery partner.”
“Accurate verification of all the items of mail we process is vital to make sure that customers can easily reconcile their postage costs. It also ensures we have a keen competitive edge in the rapidly expanding e-commerce market.”
“This is a completely bespoke solution using industry leading technology from Vitronic vision solution systems, OCS Checkweighers and Prime Vision for optical character recognition (OCR) capture. We have also chosen Equinox MHE as our equipment integrator, and will be deploying this fully automated processing solution at our Luton Hub over the next few months.”
The introduction of the XL Slide Tray Sorter and barcoding automation forms the second stage of Secured Mail’s Automation Investment Programme. The third stage will be announced later this year.
