Dutch postal company, PostNL, has reduced the volume of its mail that needs to be manually sorted by 10 per cent with an optical character recognition system that recognises all handwritten or machine-printed address elements.
Prime Vision’s Last Coding Device (LCD) has been fully operational for six months at PostNL, resulting in significant reduction in video coding errors and associated costs.
PostNL set an error rate of 0.6 per cent. LCD is delivering an error rate of 0.55 per cent at postcode level and 0.52 per cent at house number level.
At the heart of LCD is Phrase technology, Prime Vision’s holistic reasoning and assignment engine that recognises handwritten and machine-printed address elements. It can be used to rationalise an entire address, a house number or a postcode, whichever is the quickest and most effective way of keeping the mail piece in the automated sorting process.
PostNL’s process automation manager, Bart van Overbeek, commented: ‘LCD is able to code mail with no postcode or with an incorrect postcode. And this saves us even more money as it reduces the amount of mail that needs to be manually coded with full address details.’
