Background
Pitney Bowes is a 100+ year old American technology company with multiple business segments. The Presort Services business segment of Pitney Bowes Inc. is responsible for the sortation of over 17 billion pieces of mail within the United States annually, and is a certified work share partner with the United States Postal Service.
Challenge
Pitney Bowes is looking for ways to innovate and automate their mail sortation process.
During the sortation process, mail is received on pallets with standardized USPS trays holding mail. Pitney Bowes is looking for an automation solution to remove the mail trays from the pallet, empty the mail onto a sorting machine, and set aside the empty tray for later use.
Sortable mail can be both uniform unprocessed mail from a vendor, or it can be mixed mail that has previously been processed within a Pitney Bowes facility. Sortable mail arrives in trays with the address and other information oriented vertically, as you would hold a normal letter before opening it. The mail must be able to be processed in this same orientation.
What's in it for you?
A successful collaboration could mean:
- Potential intellectual property ownership options
- Potential to deploy across multiple sites within PB and other customers.
- Potential to partner with sortation machine vendors
- Form a partnership/joint venture to co-develop and co-launch the idea to market.
- Future opportunities to work with PB on other projects
- Potential business relationship development with other automation/robotics providers