Beumer Group, a supplier of automated material handling systems, has been contracted to design and integrate a new automated cross-docking parcel sortation system for parcel delivery provider Relais Colis.
The new sorting system will be installed in Relais Colis’s sortation center in the southeastern suburb of Combs-la-Ville in Paris, France. When complete, the sorter will be capable of sorting 300,000 parcels per day, more than three times the hub’s current capacity.
This is Relais Colis’s first contract for an automated sorter and is part of company-wide re-organization of its sorting centers, relay points and hubs. A second automated system will be installed in the company’s Lyon sortation center in 2017.
Jean-Sébastien Léridon, CEO of Relais Colis, said, “Our strategy is to offer higher speed for all and at any time at a lower cost. We are willing to extend the order cut-off time to 8:00pm and still provide next-day delivery from all of our 4,500 relay points. We also plan to increase the number of relay points to 8,000, by 2020, enabling us to provide parcel distribution to e-commerce consumers throughout France.”
Beumer’s cross-belt sorter-based system will sort small and large items separately for distribution within the Paris area. In addition, the LS-4000CB sorter will integrate the weighing of items with optical character recognition (OCR) and a video coding system (VCS). The OCR and VCS systems will enable remote reading of addresses, while the parcels remain in motion within the sorter, to increase efficiency and eliminate the need for parcels to be manually handled or removed from the sorter.
October 26, 2016