‘We’ve got to get bigger’

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NZ Post is opening its biggest processing centre in South Auckland this week, designed to make it whole lot faster to deliver and track your online shopping parcels.

The brand new facility opened this week, capable of processing more than double the number of items per hour.

The facility has started processing domestic parcels and will become the international gateway for all parcels in a few months, with Customs and MPI to moving into the building.

The new NZ Post processing facility in Wiri is full of bright and glossy shopping parcels, heavy bags of dog food and tiny packets on quickly-moving conveyer belts, winding around a huge warehouse.

Inside NZ Post’s new processing centre in South Auckland.
Photo: Supplied / NZ Post

NZ Post chief executive David Walsh admitted things were lagging at their previous sorting facility in Highbrook, which often led to big delays, especially around Christmas time.

“That was built about 15 to 16 years ago and that’s probably been out of capacity now for about four or five years, so we’ve know that if we want to keep pace, we’ve got to get bigger.”

The new processing facility is the size of four football fields and has more than doubled its processing capacity, rising from 13,000 items per hour to more than 30,000.

General manager of processing and automation Maree Watson said that was thanks to state-of-the-art automation technology, which removed the need to sort through parcels by hand.

“It has the brains to sort to every address in New Zealand, it’ll provide better visibility, more accuracy, more efficiency in the way that we process parcels and packets.”

Inside NZ Post’s new processing centre in South Auckland.
Photo: Supplied / NZ Post

Watson said it was a streamlined process from start to finish.

“Parcels arrive in here via truck and planes all through the night, they’re inducted onto the sorter and then the brains of the sorter does all of the magic – it reads the address, reads the barcode, measures and weighs the item and checks the quality of it.

“Then it’s fed into a sort plan that will identify where it’s being delivered – it’ll either go to one of the bags that you see here, or one of the containers that we dispatch out to our courier fleet.”

When Customs and the Ministry for Primary Industries move into the building, it will make delivering incoming and outgoing parcels from overseas a lot easier.

“So the conveyor belts will automatically bring a parcel once it’s cleared the border through to this side for domestic sortation through to all of those addresses in New Zealand.”

The site was three years in the making and is the company’s biggest investment yet, with twice the size and capacity of any other site in the country.

Inside NZ Post’s new processing centre in South Auckland.
Photo: Supplied / NZ Post

Walsh said this allowed NZ Post to meet the growing demands of online shopping.

“In New Zealand, about 10 percent of retail is online bought and in some countries around the world it’s up to double that, so we think New Zealand will continue with those global trends, a site like this allows us to keep pace with that.”

NZ Post currently processes 95 million items per year, but the company was aiming to double that by 2033.

The new Wiri facility gets the ball rolling, with further facilities planned over the next 5-10 years as online retail continues to skyrocket.