Customers around Australia could soon be getting their parcels delivered more quickly, thanks to a new machine at Australia Post’s Dandenong Letters Centre.
The ribbon was officially cut on the new sorting machine at the Dandenong South facility on Wednesday 27 November, in front of hundreds of excited employees.
The machine will expedite the sorting and delivery of satchels and large letters.
It comes just a few weeks after the centre celebrated its 20th anniversary, and extends the centre’s capability beyond sorting just letters.
It is equipped with tracking capabilities to offer customers increased visibility on their mail, as well as character recognition technology to read the addresses on parcel labels and recognise barcodes from ecommerce stores.
Facility manager Rod Hoober said in its second day of operation, the machine sorted 120,000 items – but is expected to run through up to 200,000 on peak days.
“It’s built capability within the network. We’ve now got more processing power,” he said.
“We weren’t sorting parcels within this facility; it was a letters facility for the first 20 years of its life. With the decline in letters we’re moving to parcels, so it’s created opportunity within Dandenong,” he added.
Bob Black, group chief operating officer of Australia Post, said the Dandenong facility was a natural fit for the new investment as the decline in letters had freed up space.
“It’s also five minutes from Amazon, we’ve got some big ecommerce players around, there’s a lot of work that comes in here, and Melbourne’s growing in this direction so this was an ideal location,” he added.
He said the Dandenong Letters Centre is the largest letter facility in Victoria and will continue processing around 15 million articles of mail every week.
