OREANDA-NEWS. June 23, 2011. NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) announced today its provision of a postal automation system in cooperation with Global Technological Support Sdn Bhd (GTS) for Pos Malaysia Berhad, Malaysia's national postal service. The system is deployed and fully operational at the newly established National Mail and Parcel Hub (NMPH) in Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia, where an opening ceremony was held on 21 June 2011.

The new system includes a Culler Facer Canceller (CFC), six Mail Processing Machines (MPM), a Flat Sorting Machine (FSM) and an integrated Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Video Coding System (VCS). Furthermore, three CFCs from existing nearby mail centers have been integrated at the NMPH, resulting in a large-scale unified facility.

The MPMs are high-speed letter sorting machines with an operational throughput of up to 41,000 mail items an hour, one of the world's highest levels of performance. The FSM features three automatic feeders, 220 stackers and high-speed sorting machinery with an operational throughput of up to 22,500 large and heavy mail items per hour, including envelopes, magazines and catalogues.

Additional features include an integrated postal address recognition OCR that is capable of simultaneously processing mail images from the FSM and six MPMs. The system also processes machine printed and handwritten addresses at a read rate of more than 90% by searching several million addresses at a speed of more than 70 items per second. Furthermore, the system features an open interface in compliance with conditions set by the European Committee for Standardization (CEN), which enables high scalability in the future.

This system significantly contributes to the improvement of Malaysia's mail sorting operations by enabling the sorting and distribution of postal items to efficiently take place at a single location, which formerly required four local mail centers.

NEC has deployed postal automation systems in more than fifty countries since it first entered the field in 1961. Looking forward, NEC aims to capitalize on this experience in Malaysia to promote greater postal processing efficiency throughout countries all over the world.