Postal Automation

Siemens AG is one of the worlds leading manufacturers in postal automation equipment and services. Their products stand for an essential part of the automatic reading and distribution systems in mail delivery centres all over the world. Important technologies for automatic reading and recognition of mailpiece addresses originated  at the former AEG Electrocom and have been developed and improved over several decades.

Since the beginning of our enterprise in 1985, COMPAL was involved as a partner of the AEG Electrocom again and again in the development of new product generations and essentially contributed to a lot of application projects for many countries all over the world.

This successful* long lasting customer relation continued with the Siemens AG which took over the activities of this branch from AEG after 1997 and is going very strong in this business.

The main focus in our development work is in the area of address recognition and interpretation. This is the job not only to read the address on a letter or mailpiece but also to interprete or understand it.  Even if the information is poorly readable, erroneous, incomplete or contradictionary - it should be recognized with high reading rate and simultaneously lowest error level. The distinct elements or words have to be analyzed by their meaning and compared to a nationwide reference database that has a record of all relevant delivery information in that particular country, i.e. they have to be identified. These processes use sophisticated algorithms for error-tolerant access and correlation, including complex fuzzy logics for making up the decision among several - often many - concurring intermediate and final results.

An important and often difficult task is also the creation of a consistent reference database from the raw address-data supplied by the respective postal service which have more or (often) less appropriate structure and content. Since many projects require that mailpieces are fine-sorted down to the particular receiver these data may contain volumes of up to several hundred million records.

The projects to which we have successfully contributed so far are deployed all over the world. You may get an overview taking a look onto the following World Map.

* recently we received a rating as "outstanding" supplier of the Siemens AG