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About MEDIA Logistik GmbH l PostModern
MEDIA Logistik GmbH l PostModern is an innovative postal service provider from Germany. What began in the 1990s with the distribution of business mail in the German state of Saxony soon expanded to include the delivery of private and business mail throughout Germany. Today, with an extensive and well-established partner network, the company ships parcels and letters worldwide. In 2016, a high-performance sorting center was built in the city of Dresden, where the company is headquartered.
High sorting efficiency despite increasing shipment volume
With the new sorting center, MEDIA Logistik GmbH l PostModern responded to the steady growth in mail volumes. The physical expansion allowed the company to handle larger volumes and continue to ensure reliable and fast delivery. However, as the volume of mail grew, so did the number of items that could not be read by OCR scanning and required video coding. Items with ambiguous addresses, e.g. due to illegible handwriting, cannot be sorted by the machine. Therefore, they are subject to individual sorting and processing by Postal Service employees. Due to fluctuating mail volumes and the fact that video coding must take place during the sorting process in order to meet transit times, it can be difficult to provide sufficient staff when needed.
Outsourcing video coding to stay ahead with flexible operations
MEDIA Logistik GmbH l PostModern decided to outsource the video coding process in order to reduce challenges related to staffing and costs and to make the sorting process more efficient. To do so, the postal service provider turned to Spectos, a company it has been working with since 2012 for transit time measurements and redress management. In a joint project, MEDIA Logistik GmbH l PostModern and Spectos set up all the technical and organizational requirements for Spectos to coordinate video coding for MEDIA Logistik GmbH l PostModern as an external service provider.
Via remote access, Spectos works in real time directly in the letter sorting system of MEDIA Logistik GmbH l PostModern. Only minimal implementation effort was required to set this up. Trained data entry personnel decode and correct the item data according to defined coding rules. The items are then placed back on the sorting belt for a second sorting run so that the machine can assign the shipment to its destination. Spectos currently codes around 200,000 items per month in this way (as of 2021).
Ensuring high sorting and delivery quality
Outsourcing video coding has brought MEDIA Logistik GmbH l PostModern many advantages. The data capture services by Spectos ensure the logistics company stable transit times and on-time deliveries: non-machine readable letters are decoded letters within minutes – even at peak times. The company now has gained a high level of flexibility in its daily business and has since been independent of dynamic postal volumes and unpredictable events. As a result, the postal service provider also benefits from processes that can easily be scaled up and down. Another major benefit of outsourcing video encoding is the cost savings from paying for the service on a per-unit basis vs. the cost of permanent employees. Furthermore, MEDIA Logistik GmbH l PostModern has gained additional space capacity through outsourcing: The room formerly used for video encoding has now become a meeting room.
