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Frankfurt / DPA
There was a time when postal services were about gathering heavy sacks full of letters, painstakingly sorting the mail manually and delivering letters on heavy-duty bicycles.
Not any more – with everything from drones and self-driving cars coming up, postal services are rushing into a robotic future.
In some nations, today’s sorting offices are dominated by intelligent machines, with just a few pairs of human hands standing by to keep everything running smoothly.
At Deutsche Post’s sorting office in Frankfurt, conveyor belts whirr and machinery hums and rattles. Huge crates full of letters arrive on mechanical stacking devices. The big boss of the machines, known as the GSA, sorts up to 40,000 letters an hour.
The GSA is so clever it doesn’t even need barcodes – the machine simply scans the address, even if it’s handwritten. It’s a sort of facial recognition system for letters. The system is then able to recognize that letter again at every processing point until it is finally delivered. Afterwards, the scans are automatically deleted.
Nader Afshari has been working at the Frankfurt depot for 26 years. Clean-shaven and wearing a crisp blue shirt, he works near the front of the main hall putting the sorted letters into boxes.
“The biggest change over the past 20 years has been this modernization,” says Afshari. “Before, there would be 20 people working in this section. Now, there are only three.” He smiles as he speaks, acknowledging the work of the machines with silent gratitude.
The main hall at the sorting office has changed dramatically during Afshari’s career. Almost every stage of the process now involves machines. The person delivering the mail will ideally receive trays in the order it needs to be delivered in, saving time and money.
Andreas Hagebusch, the night shift supervisor, says: “Things get more expensive once the mail leaves the building, so we try to prepare as much as possible in here.” By ‘we’, Hagebusch also means Deutsche Post’s fleet of machines. Their work has become indispensable to the process.
Indeed, machines look set to play an even bigger role in the delivery of mail in the future.
US mail-order giant Amazon recently delivered parcels in England using drones, and say this will become a regular service.
BIEK, the German parcels and postal trade association, whose members also includes the likes of UPS, is sceptical about Amazon’s plans.
“It remains to be seen whether a company like Amazon – which does not have a background in courier services or express postal services, so has no specialist knowledge to fall back on – will actually be able to provide the same level of service as specialist couriers and express parcel delivery services,” a spokeswoman says.
