In the picture on sortation

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.