Royal Mail set to bring PSM to Home Counties North mail centre
Royal Mail has revealed that its Home Counties North facility will be the next mail centre to receive a Parcel Sorting Machine (PSM), following a successful launch at Swindon. The machine sorts parcels that have 2D barcodes. It also uses optical character recognition to read addresses from non-barcoded items and can handle parcels from the size of a CD up to an airline hand luggage bag, with a weight range of 50g to 3kg.
According to a notice posted on the myroyalmail.com website yesterday (14 February), the Swindon PSM handled more than 500,000 parcels during the Christmas period and the response from staff to the new system has been “overwhelmingly positive”.
Swindon plant manager Mel Peirson said: ‘Being the first site has been very exciting. We’ve had fantastic support from the project team and our colleagues have been very determined in getting to grips with the training.”
Commenting on the PSM roll-out Simon Barker, director of process collection and engineering, said: ‘This machine fulfils our promise to automate our parcels operation to help improve our competitive offering. We have worked closely with CWU and Unite CMA throughout this programme and we are still learning so that we can make this a great opportunity for colleagues.
‘There are also exciting opportunities to get reliable and valuable information on the parcels we process, and to develop ways of using this to improve our customer service, so we stay number one in parcels.’
