State-of-the-art sortation in Romania
Two Vanderlande CROSSORTERs and a TRAYSORTER are helping Romanian parcel company FAN Courier successfully embrace the benefits of automation.
With around 700 employees organised in three shifts, more than 180,000 items a day are sorted in its main hub in Bucharest and handed over to couriers, which equates to over 36 million item deliveries a year.
Speed is of the essence
FAN Courier’s desire to move from manual operations to automated processes was largely driven by significant increases in e-commerce, combined with the scarcity of labour and the difficulty to react quickly to peak time demands.
The above factors had already brought FAN Courier into contact with Vanderlande, resulting in the installation of a TRAYSORTER system that increased sorting capacity by 5,600 parcels per hour.
The success of this system saw FAN Courier take further steps towards automation with the addition of two Vanderlande CROSSORTER systems in its main distribution centre (DC).
With a combined sorting capacity of 39,000 parcels per hour, the CROSSORTERs offer a highly flexible flow for sorting parcels of many different sizes with different types of packaging.
A relationship built on people and technology
This ambitious project has resulted in the creation of the largest sorting centre in the FAN Courier network. The installation of the two Vanderlande sorting systems has led to an increase in sorting capacity from 16,000 to 44,000 parcels per hour.
“We chose Vanderlande’s CROSSORTER because of its high-capacity sorting capabilities,” says FAN Courier’s Mechanical Engineering and Installations Supervisor Florin Ilie. “Also, the efficient design of the system and the large gravity-fed chutes were big factors in our decision, as well as the overall ‘gentle handling’ and the way it protects the parcels.”
Thanks to the installation of Vanderlande’s CROSSORTERs, FAN Courier has been able to reduce its dependence on manual labour with a scalable system. This has facilitated an increase in capacity to almost double current levels.