The Start of the Big Tour

A tour that took close to two hours and covered three of their enormous manufacturing plants. It was remarkable to see how such integrated machinery is machined or constructed—from the smallest parts and mechanisms through to belt drives and complicated electronic circuits—that make up their document and mail automation systems as well as their warehouse automation systems.

Respect for Their Skill

I especially appreciated the immense technical competency of so many individuals on the factory floor. And, of course, who cannot be impressed by metalwork fabrication—including folding, welding, and burnishing—as well as the creation of the smallest, most intricate parts alongside large “rackings” or ladders (as they call them) for automated picking & packing systems, which can take a thousand-square-metre warehouse and condense it into just a couple of hundred square metres. There are clearly phenomenal space-saving opportunities through automated picking & packing systems, as well as significant time-on-task savings.

"It’s the sort of thing we hear talked about from Amazon, but at a scale that Kiwi distributors could benefit from at cost-commensurate pricing. I gather return on investment can be less than one year! With the recent “glimmer” of investment support in last month’s budget, the time couldn’t be better to bring your warehouse into the 21st century."

Conveyor-Fed Scanning

I, of course, have a love affair with the Falcon “conveyor-fed” document scanners—and now the Gemini scanners too—which offer super-high throughput for standard cut-sheet documents as well as the ability to scale back for more fragile, flimsy, or rather thick documents as well.

The idea of a conveyor-fed scan system has always impressed me as an obsessive multitasker. The beauty of the conveyor feed into the scanner for documents or mail (an automatic letter opener & envelope-contents “presenter” can be attached, too) is that one operator can do the prep as well as the scan phase at the same time. Further, with such a mechanism, lots of different shapes, sizes, and thicknesses of documents can be managed more carefully than with traditional desktop or benchtop scanners, resulting in fewer jams or misfeeds that may damage documents. It also means the scanner system can keep processing minute after minute, hour after hour, all day—especially if you “hot-station” the scanner. You can even process Codafile covers with the plastic fitting still attached, to image and extract the critical metadata off the file covers. Speaking of which, one of the great features is the multiple sorting bins after digitisation, providing you with options for organising your content: mixed output for filing, recycling, or destruction, including a straight-path option for rigid or more fragile records. As a nice factoid, I learned that the feeder & pick rollers on the Falcons and Geminis have a life expectancy of one million sheets (and are cheap to replace)!

ROI and the Road Ahead

Once again, return on investment is a key driver for OPEX, and in our opinion, a prep-and-scan approach to digitisation of mail and business documents/records is clearly a game-changer for organisations like ours and for customers across Aotearoa New Zealand.

We talked about the future, and the intelligent people at OPEX are actively pursuing multiple options and lines of enquiry for integrating AI into their scan and automation processes. As you know from recent publications on this channel, I've been thinking a lot about integrating AI into document classification, and we dared to imagine what it might look like on-the-fly as each piece of paper passed through the scanner.‍

I came away with a renewed sense of pride that a firm with 50 years’ pedigree, a strong foot in both document scanning & handling automation and warehouse automation, 1,600 employees worldwide, and installations on five continents can still feel like a friendly, almost family-style business … exactly the sort of firm I love to partner with ❤️🤍💙😀”

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Keywords: #Scanning #Digitisation #Automation #AI #MailProcessing #AutoClassification #Metadata #WarehouseAutomation #DigitalWorkplace