Wanted: innovative solutions to increase sorting efficiency
Meeting customers’ expectations and the success of your business rely heavily on the efficiency of your processes. Process management can be the most challenging part of any business, especially if your business requires employees to complete some manual tasks within a certain time frame. It becomes even more difficult and problematic if you do not have the suitable and needed manpower to accomplish these tasks.
Despite large investments in automated sorting equipment, manual labor is still required in the parcel and mail logistics industry. For example, determining the correct sorting destinations must be done manually when the machines cannot automatically sort the address. On average, this is the case for 3 – 7 % of all shipments, due to the poor quality of their address labels or incorrect information in address databases.
This costs a lot of time and manpower. The ineffectiveness of the process can result in further problems and even affect the overall service quality. Furthermore, it can lead to increased costs as the manual process depends on individuals. This places a burden on postal service management to continuously hire and train employees. However, automated mail and parcel sorting can be easily optimized if a company adopts agile and innovative solutions in its operations.
Video Coding at a Glance – Download Data Sheet (PDF)
Automated and yet Manual: Identifying Challenges in Automated Mail and Parcel Sortation
To make automated sorting processes even more efficient, you must identify weak points and find quick solutions for overcoming them. One of these challenges can occur in automated sorting.
Imagine that when an automated parcel sorting machine processes 100,000 parcels per day, about 5,000 parcels must first be decoded manually.
Every day there is a considerable amount of letters and parcels that cannot be sorted automatically by the machines due to poor address label quality – handwritten, reflective, incorrect data. Decoding the items manually and matching them with the information in the address database is time-consuming and also pulls your employees away from their core tasks. Additionally, having enormous amounts of non-sortable parcels and letters demands having the right workforce to accomplish this task quickly and effectively. But, you can overcome this pain point in your business process if you eliminate and modernize the manual process. This modernization comes in the form of digitization services and innovative solutions that you can outsource to achieve your business goals.
Maximize the Efficiency of Automated Sorting by Outsourcing Manual Tasks
Outsourcing the video coding process can effectively support your company in the face of the aforementioned challenges. Reliably and quickly, an external team of experts decodes the unreadable items. After successful decoding, which is performed in parallel with sorting, the parcels and letters are returned to the sorting machine. This can now assign the correct sorting destination. Delivery quality and agreed delivery dates are thus not affected by fluctuating sorting volumes. This form of process optimization significantly reduces your staffing requirements. Outsourced video coding maximizes efficiency in decoding unreadable items in your sortation and further increases sorting capacity for mail and parcels. This will have a noticeably positive impact on your company’s profitability, service quality and success.
How many items per month do you manually decode in sorting?
Use the pricing calculator to work out your costs for outsourced video coding
Seven Benefits of Optimized Automated Mail and Parcel Sorting
Efficiency in the postal service industry is always a privilege for the management, stockholders, and other interested parties. With the efficiency of your sorting operations, you will see a variety of benefits for your business that are reflected in the following:
- Increased capacity – Better sorting efficiency allows you to cope with the growth in e-commerce delivery volumes and further improve your delivery times.
- Reducing personnel requirements – In addition to fluctuating shipment volumes, unattractive working hours and a tight labor market are major challenges for the planning of resources. An external team provides flexible and reliable trained personnel around the clock.
- Cost savings – Errors and inefficiencies in sorting processes increase operational costs. But, you can reduce costs and use this money for other worthwhile investments in your business if the processes are handled more effectively.
- Excellent business flow – Proper business process management makes the daily workflow more productive. It also protects your business from the challenge of having huge volumes of shipping piling up in the warehouses that can bring out havoc to your daily operations.
- Satisfied customers – Efficient postal process management ensures the reliability of your delivery time frame and hence it will be the path to gaining the satisfaction of your customers. This reliability will not only make them satisfied for a while, but it will also ensure their retention and build long-term loyalty.
- Referral customers – Nothing gets a business name around better than word of mouth. One of the beliefs of customer success is that your service creates advocates for your business. An army of pleased customers can do an influential marketing campaign for you. If you have happy customers, it will encourage and inspire others to use your service.
- Happy employees – With maximum efficiency of your automated sorting processes, your employees will receive the benefits of convenience and ease of work. They will be less stressed and will perform their working shifts with less error
Last but not least
Any questions left? Visit our landing page on external video coding for more information about the Spectos digitization service for postal companies.
Go to Spectos Video Coding Solution for Postal Companies
Tip: Watch our webinar recording Boosting Postal Sorting Efficiency by Outsourcing Video Coding or listen to the podcast Squeezing more Efficiency from Parcel Sorting
Further reads:
- External video coding at Bladkompagniet
- Digitization services and video coding for MEDIA Logistik GmbH l PostModern
By the way: Spectos also offers a solution for the digitization of CN labels & customs data collection.
