It is episode 232 of the Postal Hub podcast. In this weekly format, host Ian Kerr discusses latest industry developments with international experts from the postal, logistics and delivery sector. In this episode his guest is Bertrand Späth, Head of Business Development at Spectos. The topic: Squeezing efficiency from parcel and letter sorting.
In the 20 minute podcast, Ian Kerr and Bertrand Späth talk about current challenges for parcel processing. Booming parcel volumes are pushing postal operators to their capacity limits, requiring ever more efficient operations to sort items quickly. Postal companies are taking cost-intensive measures, such as investing in state-of-the-art sorting machines, to further increase sorting capacities. However, about 5% of all parcels and letters are still sorted manually because sorting machines cannot read the address fields. The reasons for this vary, such as poor address field quality, as is often the case for low-cost merchandise shipments from Asia, or illegible handwriting.
But manual sorting takes up valuable time and human resources – and the higher the volume of shipments, the more resources it requires. In addition to high costs for the parcel company, the customer experience can suffer because reliability and punctuality in shipment delivery are negatively affected due to a lack of efficiency.
Optimizing mail and parcel sorting through outsourced video coding
In the podcast, Bertrand Späth describes a solution for mail and parcel processing that is well-known and widely used in the postal and logistics industry: video coding. Rather than postal companies handling the process of decoding items that are unreadable by machines themselves, it can be outsourced to external service providers such as Spectos. The digitization solution is easy to implement and adapts to existing sorting rules. In the podcast, Bertrand Späth explains how postal companies can gain more flexibility and efficiency, reduce costs and easily handle peak volumes in their sorting centers through automated and optimized sorting processes.
But we don’t want to give too much away, listen for yourself! We thank Ian Kerr for the invitation and the pleasant talk.
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Recommendation: Everything you need to know about Spectos Video Coding for Postal & Parcel Companies on YouTube!