Machines and hands that make the mail go through - automation at the Merrifield General Mail Facility, Virginia

Nation's Business, May, 1990 by Bradford A. McKee

The Postal Service is counting on automation to cut its costs. The automation scheme at the Merrifield General Mail Facility, in Merrifield, Va., provides a quick scan of the U.S. Postal Service's mixed bag of technology. Some of Merrifield's advances are state-of-the-art electronics. Other parts of the vast system are stubbornly state-of-the-past.

In the 400,000-square-foot facility, about 2,000 postal employees cull, cancel, sort, and stack 5 million pieces of mail coming in each night from the region's 130 post offices in 3,861 square miles of northern Virginia.

The letters come off the trucks and are separated by size. Fat, oblong envelopes and 8-by-10-inch envelopes fall aside in the culling area, swept off the conveyor belts by selective cylindrical rollers that allow only letter-sized pieces to pass underneath.

After the mail is broken into size groups, the various echelons of automation--and their utility and futility--come into play.

The choicest pieces of mail--small, slender, and with typewritten addresses--enter the most highly automated processing. They pass through the optical character reader (OCR). Merrifield has three OCRs, costing $590,000 each. These machines can read up to four lines of typed or printed address on 35,000 pieces of mail an hour.

Once the OCR reads an envelope's address, its ink jet sprays a bar code on the lower right side of the envelope's front; the bar code specifies the exact address. The envelope then is read by one of eight $153,000 bar-code sorters that send the envelope marching upright down a thin conveyor strip, and the machine's electronic memory causes the envelope to be derailed into its proper sorting bin--one of 100 marked by ZIP code.

Mail that cannot be read by an OCR goes back about 30 technological years to a mechanized sorting system. Like court reporters at a trial, 12 clerks sit at small keyboards as a pivoting pneumatic arm whips 1,700 pieces of mail an hour in front of each them. Faced with a letter, a clerk taps a sequence of keys to assign its destination, and the mail whizzes off into an old letter-sorting machine--an assembly of belts, ramps, and cubby holes--and lands according to ZIP code and a carrier's route.

If a piece of mail is not electronically readable, or if it is too bulky to go through either the electronic or the mechanized sorting system, it moves to a system that Benjamin Franklin set up, the pigeon-hole. The irregular pieces of mail--swollen little parcels strapped shut with stretched tape--keep the Postal Service partly in the 1700s. By hand, clerks take stacks of mail and sort them into little boxes, again, to be ordered for the letter carriers.

Automation, especially the OCR technology, is a godsend--"a wild system"--says Henry Cleffi, a postal official at Merrifield. But sometimes automation can't cope, such as during the December holidays, when the center some days must sort 3 million handwritten greeting cards--additional volume that can't be sorted by OCRs--a gigantic task for eyes and hands.

Whatever the Postal Service's technological advances, some traditions might endure.