Relais Colis and KLM Cargo have announced significant upgrades to their parcel handling facilities.
Relais Colis, in which DHL has a minority stake, has awarded a new contract to specialist supplier, Beumer, to design and integrate a new parcel sortation system at its hub in Genas, near Lyon, in France.
It follows the installation by Beumer of an almost identical system at the company's Combs-La-Ville hub, in the Greater Paris region, which entered service in April 2017.
“The new cross-docking sortation system is based on an energy-efficient LS-4000 sorter which will provide Relais Colis with the flexibility to handle a wide range of parcel sizes. This ensures a highly efficient parcel delivery which enables an 8pm order cut-off time combined with next-day delivery to consumers throughout France,” Beumer daid in a statement.
Relais Colis' Managing Director, Jean-Sébastien Léridon, explained that automated systems are central to Relais Colis' business strategy to combine a higher delivery speed with a lower cost to customers.
The new sortation system is part of a €40 million transformation in the Relais Colis brand which includes launching new services, in addition to tripling turnover and driving a 25-fold increase in customer numbers within the next four years.
The funding was leveraged from DHL Parcel who now own around a third of the company's capital.
Increasd handling capacity, with bigger and more efficient depots and the expansion of the number of pick-up points are also key elements in the transformation plan.
Relais Colis has a network of 4,800 pick-up points or 'parcel shops' in France and delivers 32 million parcels annually.
In May this year, Relais Colis signed a partnership agreement with City of Paris transit company, RATP, to test out two pick-up points for parcels at bus station locations in the French capital over a six-month period
In a separate development, KLM Cargo recently announced that it had introduced a new sorting system at its Amsterdam Schiphol hub capable of handling more than 2,000 items per hour, bound for more than 70 destinations.
The system was built in cooperation with Lödige Industries and Vanderlande. The innovative sorter allows for faster handling of all post, express and pharmaceutical consignments.
“E-commerce is a fast-growing branch in the cargo industry. This innovative system allows us to keep pace with the rapid increase in post and express consignments. The system is faster and smarter, allowing us to offer better service to our customers,” said Marcel de Nooijer, EVP KLM Cargo.
Parent company Air France introduced the same system at its Paris-Charles de Gaulle hub in April 2015.
