Separation card
A separator card is a tool that is used in automatic letter sorting to separate customers. The customer separation card was introduced when the postal service providers expanded their range of services and began, unlike in the past, also to process unpaid mail.
Customer separation cards
Today, many postal service providers have the option of having the unstamped daily mail picked up and assigning the postal service provider the task of separating the mail items according to size and weight in order to then frank them accordingly. For efficient processing of these letters, the mailings of the individual customers are separated with customer separation cards. The separation cards have a unique barcode that is assigned to a customer before the sorting process. The sorting machine reads the barcode and assigns the type and quantity of the following items to the stored customer so that the postal service provider can issue an invoice. The next separation card in the sorting process closes the previous customer and opens the accounting for the following customer.
This procedure results in the need for perfect recognition of the separation card so that the accounts can be created without errors. For this reason, the older type of separator cards contain a fixed piece of aluminum foil that is not 100% recognized. In addition, the metal clips or coins contained in the letters can trigger malfunctions.
The next generation was further developed by Pitney Bowes and contains a striped pattern made of aluminum foil for detection on the metal detector.
The latest generation of separation cards contains an RFID chip instead of aluminum foil , and the metal detector had to give way to an RFID reader. This generation is recognized 100% and provides verifiably perfect accounts. The first user of this new technology has been bpost (Belgian Post) in a sorting center in Brussels / Zaventem at the airport since 2011 . Several thousand separation cards are in use there every evening. bpost had previously had massive problems with correct billing and thus also lost customers. After switching to the RFID chip, extensive tests were carried out, all shipments were counted by hand beforehand, the shipments were processed automatically with the separation cards and an account was then created. The deviation for more than 250,000 shipments was a single shipment.
A new area for divider cards has arisen in the area of aisle sequencing . While a special sorting machine was developed and built for every purpose in the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium, nowadays the machines are used several times for reasons of cost, because of the reduction in space requirements and also because of the decreasing volume of letters. In the evening the machine works as an address reader and in the early morning hours with the help of district separation cards as an aisle sorting machine.
District separation cards
The result after the delivery route sorting is an orderly sequence of all shipments within a delivery area (district). To process several delivery areas, it makes sense to use district separation cards, since an assignment of a sorting compartment (machine) / district can represent a limitation in the sorting of aisle sequence.
The district separation within the aisle sequencing beyond the subject boundaries is realized by special separation cards. The allocation of the separation cards to the sequence runs takes place in the first run sequence.
In contrast to the customer separation card, the district separation card does not have a metal core. The identification takes place via the printed barcode. This follows the pattern: identifier + unique number.
In the first aisle sequence, the district separation cards are fed into the process. If a district separation card barcode is recognized, it is checked whether this is known in the system.
If the map is known, the stored position is returned. If the card is unknown, it is assigned to the first free position and this position is returned.
If the map is not known and no further free positions are available, the map is removed.
If the aisle sorting consists of n runs (n = 2, 3, 4 ...), the result after the nth run is:
District1 sorted - District separation card - District2 sorted - District separation card - District3 sorted ...