TNT Post has achieved a 70% cost saving and improved quality by offshoring ‘video coding’ ofpoor-quality mail addresses from the Netherlands to Asia. The award-winning scheme will be extended
to parcels and European mail operations in the next few months, managers told CEP-Research.Video coding refers to sorting centre staff manually entering data such as street names, postcodes or other visual address information on letters that cannot be automatically recognised bysorting equipment.
In April 2010 TNT Post decided to switch video coding from the Netherlands to two offshorelocations in the Philippines and Vietnam, Mario Suykerbuyk said at last week’s Post-Expo inCopenhagen. Since then the company has achieved a 70% saving in operational costs and improvedquality dramatically with high data entry standards, he explained.
Up to six million images are processed each day, with an average time of just 12 seconds perimage. This means the unrecognised address images can be transmitted to the two sites in Asia,entered manually and transmitted back to the Netherlands while the letter is still going throughthe sorting equipment. Previously the letter had to be delayed while the address was enteredmanually.
Other benefits are extremely flexible scaling-up or down of staffing in line with volumes,online performance information and management reports. The use of two locations ensured a back-upin case of any technical problems at one site, the TNT manager pointed out.
In the next step, TNT Post will roll out offshore video coding to its parcels operations and itsEuropean Mail Networks markets between Q4, 2010 and Q1, 2011, Suykerbuyk told CEP-Research. “Theimage volumes will go up to 12 million a day at peak times,” he said.
The TNT Post Offshore Video Coding solution was one of the winners of the PTI awards atPost-Expo last week.
