Royal Mail to handle peak demand with 10 new parcel conveyors

Ahead of this year’s peak Christmas period, Royal Mail is installing 10 new large-parcel conveyors at its mail centers to speed up sorting and improve tracking.

According to Royal Mail, the average parcel size it handles has grown by over 25% and the number of parcels bigger than a shoebox has doubled since 2017, so the new conveyors will help it cope with these larger parcels.

Royal Mail’s in-house engineering team initially designed and built a new large-parcel conveyor for the Midlands Parcel Hub, using belts instead of the typical rollers. The same design is now being rolled out across its mail centers.

The original large-parcel conveyors are live at Royal Mail’s Gatwick and South Midlands mail centers, and installations are now taking place at Jubilee and Tyneside. Ahead of Christmas, conveyors will be deployed at Medway, Birmingham, Leeds, Home Counties North and Belfast. Chelmsford, Greenford and Bristol will have theirs installed by February next year.

Neil Chaplain, Royal Mail’s engineering and process design director, said, “We are seeing an increasing number of larger parcels being sent through our network as online shopping habits continue to evolve. The addition of our in-house-designed large-parcel conveyors to some of our busiest mail centers will help us automate the handling of them as much as possible and increase efficiency, especially as we head into the peak Christmas shopping period.”

Royal Mail is also installing an additional three parcel sortation machines at its mail centers, adding to the 36 currently in operation.