New BEUMER sortation system for Relais Colis’ Paris facility
BEUMER Group will be designing and integrating a new automated cross-docking parcel sortation system at Relais Colis’ Paris sortation centre in Combs-la-Ville. The new automated system has a capacity of 300,ooo parcels a day which – according to BEUMER Group – will “enable the Paris sortation centre to process 3 times more packages, in half the time, compared to the existing manual system”.
This is Relais Colis’ first contract for an automated sorter and is part of company-wide re-organisation of its sorting centres, relay points and hubs. A second automated system is scheduled to be in the Lyon Sortation Centre in 2017.
“Our strategy is to offer higher speed for all and at any time at a lower cost,” said Jean-Sébastien Léridon, CEO of Relais Colis. “We are willing to extend the order cut-off time to 8pm and still provide next-day delivery from all of our 4500 relay points. We also plan to increase the number of relay points to 8,000, by 2020, enabling us to provide parcel distribution to e-commerce consumers throughout France.”
The BEUMER Group’s cross-belt sorter-based system will provide Relais Colis with an even higher capacity than originally specified in the tender due to a wide range of parcel sizes which can be handled by the LS-4000CB cross-belt sorter.
The sorter design also provides for planned expansion in capacity to support future growth in the e-commerce market.
The system will sort small and large items separately for distribution within the Paris area. Large items will be discharged directly to a boom conveyer and then to a truck, whilst small items will be sorted into large bags which will be placed in cages before being transferred to a truck.
The LS-4000CB sorter will integrate dynamic weighing of items as well as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and a Video Coding System (VCS). The OCR and VCS systems will enable the remote reading of addresses while the parcels remain in motion within the sorter – which will speed up the handling process.
Relais Colis currently delivers 30 million parcels annually, with real-time monitoring, and includes leading e-trade companies within its customer base.
