Swiss Post moves ahead with postal automation plans
Swiss Post has signed a contract with NEC Corporation for culler facer cancellers (CFC) which the postal operator will use to advance its automation plans. NEC is scheduled to supply 13 systems for three of Swiss Post’s large-scale mail sorting centres by February 2019. The mail centres are located in Mülligen, Härkingen and Eclépens.
According to NEC: “The CFCs automatically identify the destination of small postal items and process them based on their size, thickness and weight, as well as adjust their alignment and manage the application of postmarks, all of which was formerly carried out by hand.”
The CFCs are capable of processing up to 38,000 postal items an hour.
In 2003, Swiss Post initiated its ReEngineering of the Mail Automation (REMA) project for improving the sorting structure of the company’s mail process. As part of this project, NEC has provided eight Flat Sorting Machines for automatically reading the destinations and sorting large postal items.
Meanwhile, Swiss Post has also agreed a ten-year research partnership with the Zurich Information Security and Privacy Center (ZISC) at the ETH Zurich.
Swiss Post said that this cooperation will be very promising, particularly in the fields of security, machine learning, analytics and robotics.
