Home delivery courier
network, Hermes, handles
more than 160 million
collections and deliveries each year,
providing flexible delivery options.

To cope with additional business,
it opted for a new system to handle
small parcels, bagged and flat items.

A new vertical cross belt sorter from
Interroll was installed, together with
six new induct doors, five extending
boom conveyors and a new conveyor
system. The system needed to sort
6000 items/h, and this was achieved
with a conveyor speed of 1.7m/s.

There was also the need for
reliable, accurate data capture and,
for this, Hermes turned to Vitronic
who had previously installed two
multi-sided camera barcode reading
systems on two shoe sorters. These
were VIPAC R5 – six camera five
sided reading systems, which
included two top cameras looking at
different angles to the items. This
enables the cameras to read barcodes
from two different views, enabling
the capture of wavy barcodes or
those with foil creating reflections.

This idea was adopted in the new
system and a VIPAC R1 – two
camera system was installed. Also
included was Vitronic’s ‘Web viewer’
software which enables users to log
into the system from anywhere in the
world via Web-enabled devices.