The least amount of handling is the best customer service we can provide,' says Jim Clausen. And as facility manager for the United States Postal Service Twin Cities Metro Hub in Minneapolis, he should know. On a typical day, the hub sorts 85,000 pieces of second-class mail and standard bundles (magazines and promotional pieces) and 70,000 pieces of priority mail.

Clausen also knows his hub is closer than ever to that top level of customer service. It now relies on an automated package processing system (APPS) to sort all second-class, standard bundles and priority mail there.

Throughput is up 83%. As a result, the 10 to 15 trailers that once sat in the parking lot filled with unprocessed mail are gone. The time that mail is at the hub has dropped from as many as three days to less than four hours.

Better yet, it's a story of last to first, explains Clausen. 'This hub was once seen as a hindrance to handling mail in the Twin Cities district. Now it's seen as an extreme asset.' With the APPS (Lockheed Martin), the facility processes 55% more bundles an hour than the best performing hubs in the country using previous generation technology.

But it won't be that way for long. To reduce the amount of handling required to move mail, the USPS plans to roll out the APPS to at least 70 and as many as 120 other hubs across the country during the next few years. Twin Cities is just the leading edge of a $300 million investment in first-class handling by the USPS.

When Clausen first arrived at the Twin Cities Hub, both labor and handling equipment were under performing. Service failures were 'quite routine,' stranding 50,000 to 150,000 pieces of mail weekly in the hub. Trailers in the lot managed overflow.

As gains were made on the labor front, throughput of the hub's three small parcel bundle sorters (SPBS) was improved. But even at their most productive, they were still nearly 20% off the pace of the best hubs.

At the same time, SPBS had its own limitations. It is a linear sorter that does not allow bundles of unsorted mail to recirculate. Address information that directs sortation is manually keyed in during induction. Maximum throughput is less than 5,000 bundles an hour.

The USPS needed a next generation sortation system with significantly higher throughput and productivity. Clausen volunteered Twin Cities as the site for a prototype, one of three that were installed by different suppliers for live tests that ran for a year ending in November 2002.

The USPS set the performance bar high. The dual induction system needed to sort 9,500 bundles an hour, nearly twice the rate of the SPBS. Parcel damage could not exceed 0.1%, and 1% for bundle breakage. Bar code reader error rate needed to be 0.02% or lower. The optical character recognition (OCR) error rate (for reading labels without bar codes) was limited to 1.5%.

In the end, Clausen lucked out, with the prototype in Twin Cities winning the competition. Now underway is the next phase of the program—installation of the production model.

By early next month, a dual induction APPS with a singulation unit will be up and running at Twin Cities. This production version will sort to 199 bins, compared to 100 in the prototype, and will run 20 hours a day, seven days a week. Image capture for both bar codes and OCR is four sided for maximum flexibility (see layout below for operation details).

The prototype will be removed from the facility by early next year, says Clausen. Between then and the installation of a second APPS at another hub a few months later, Twin Cities is destined to be the best in the nation.

But that distinction won't go unnoticed. Clausen expects to see, in time, as much as 20% more mail shifted to Twin Cities.

The first major test for the system will come between Thanksgiving and Christmas when priority mail volume from Minneapolis-area mail- and e-order houses spikes. 'It gets pretty intense around here for those days,' Clausen says. Then again, he likes his chances this year more than ever.