Effective Sorting Solutions Get More Important than Ever Due to COVID-Driven Boom of E-commerce

With the global explosion of logistics demand driven by online shopping since 21st century and the rapid development of logistics automation technology, parcel delivery as a key process in  improving logistics efficiency is faced with higher standard.

At the beginning of the 2020, the sudden epidemic caused a worldwide panic and people tried to reduce person-to-person contact to avoid spread of COVID-19. Under this situation, online shopping shows its edges over the traditional way of shopping. The COVID- driven boom of online shopping brought the whole logistics industry great opportunity as well as challenge. The automated sorting equipment is playing a significant role in the process of parcel delivery as it can improve sorting efficiency and reduce labor costs.

SNBC has been committed to the logistics industry for a long time. Several SNBC solutions have been provided to the express company and excellent results have been achieved. SNBC provides a complete set of solution than just machines to express companies and these solutions have gained great popularity and recognition among customers. In this year, more express companies are equipped with SNBC logistics automation equipment to relieve their pressure on sorting and delivery.

SNBC logistics industry solutions cover the whole process of package generation, sorting and delivery. In the parcel order generation phase, SNBC can provide solutions for label printing including the portable label printer used by couriers when collecting parcels, the desktop label printer used by e-commerce owners/express outlets when printing a waybill and the industrial barcode label printer used by sorting center/warehouse for various printing purposes. In the parcel sorting phase, SNBC can provide the sorting center with one-stop automated solutions covering parcel unloading, sorting and loading, which can save more than 70% of the manpower of the sorting center.

At present, the express sorting center has two types of business: large parcel sorting and small parcel sorting. In the traditional way of large parcel sorting, each conveyor requires manual work for parcel dragging, code scanning and parcel sorting while SNBC automated large parcel sorting solution can save the manpower spent on manual sorting. After entering the sorting area, parcels will be dragged apart one by one through the parcel singulator and the siding machine, and then pass the omni-directional barcode scanning machine which can scan the parcel barcode to get its weight and volume information. RFID label of the large parcel will be read by the RFID tunnel machine before the parcel entering the sorting area. By analyzing parcel information collecting by the omni-directional barcode scanning machine and the RFID tunnel machine, the system can determine where the parcel should be sorted and when the parcel move to the right location, the swing wheel sorter will distributes parcels to the specified direction. 

In the traditional way of small parcel sorting, “manual work + conveyor mode” or “manual work + basket mode” counting on human memory to sort parcels lead to low sorting efficiency and high error rate (8%). Besides, a large number of temporary workers are needed in the express sorting peak, but it is difficult for temporary workers to memorize routing information in a short time. SNBC automated small parcel sorting solution can lower the sorting error rate to one ten-thousandth. The product solutions mainly includes two types: cross belt and straight line sorting system. The cross belt is suitable for application scenarios with large amount of sorting, high efficiency requirement and multiple sorting directions. The straight line is suitable for application scenarios with small area, no more than 100 sorting directions and an efficiency of less than 8000 pieces/hour. At present these two solutions have been applied by China post, JD logistics and other customers in a large scale.

In this year, SNBC has participated in many logistics automation bidding in China, and the winning rate is very high, which has laid a good foundation for its logistics automation products. In order to promote the development of logistics industry, SNBC will constantly update its products to meet the latest industry standard.