Malaysia automates national postal service

An automation system has recently been deployed for Malaysia’s national postal service, Pos Malaysia Berhad, unifying the large-scale facility and achieving one of the highest operational throughputs in the world. The system was launched last month and is now fully operational at the newly established National Mail and Parcel Hub in Shah Alam, Selangor. The system includes a Culler Facer Canceller (CFC), 6 Mail Processing Machines (MPM), a Flat Sorting Machine (FSM) and an integrated Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Video Coding System (VCS). Three CFCs from existing nearby mail centres have also been integrated at the NMPH, resulting in a large-scale unified facility.
The MPMs are high-speed letter sorting machines with an operational throughput of up to 41,000 mail items an hour, one of the world’s highest levels of performance. The FSM features three automatic feeders, 220 stackers and high-speed sorting machinery with an operational throughput of up to 22,500 large and heavy mail items per hour, including envelopes, magazines and catalogues.
Additional features include an integrated postal address recognition OCR that is capable of simultaneously processing mail images from the FSM and 6 MPMs. The system also processes machine printed and handwritten addresses at a read rate of more than 90 percent by searching several million addresses at a speed of more than 70 items per second. The system features an open interface in compliance with conditions set by the European Committee for Standardisation, which enables high scalability in the future.

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