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Good practice Imported

Hongkong Post's NEC-Built System Reads 564,000 Chinese-Address Letters an Hour

Hong Kong · Hong Kong · See the Hong Kong profile · See the Hong Kong profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 32% 67/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Hongkong Post's 15 NEC-built mail-sorting systems, running at the Central Mail Centre since 2008, were upgraded in 2017 to read handwritten and printed traditional Chinese addresses, lifting Chinese-address throughput to 564,000 items an hour.

564,000 items/hour
Chinese-address mail processed (2017)
15
Address-reading/sorting systems deployed (since 2008)
Hongkong Post's NEC-Built System Reads 564,000 Chinese-Address Letters an Hour

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
Hongkong Post
Period
2008–2017 deployment, ongoing operation
Keywords
postal services, digital government, public administration, logistics

Context

Hongkong Post handles rising volumes of mail addressed in traditional Chinese characters, which are far harder to machine-read than the fixed Latin alphabet. NEC has supplied Hongkong Post's postal automation technology for roughly 30 years, delivering 15 address-reading and sorting systems running at the Central Mail Centre in Kowloon Bay since 2008.

Activities

In February 2017, NEC added a function letting these systems read addresses written in traditional Chinese characters, both printed and handwritten, alongside their existing English-address recognition.

Results

The upgraded systems can automatically sort and process up to 564,000 postal items with Chinese-character addresses per hour at the Central Mail Centre, on top of existing English-language throughput.

Conclusions

NEC's press material does not publish an independent accuracy or missort-rate figure for the Chinese-character function, nor a documented before/after comparison against manual sorting, so the efficiency claim rests on the vendor's own throughput specification rather than an independently audited evaluation.

Implementation
Indicative cost
High (€500k–€5M) — Cost of the 15-system deployment and 2017 upgrade not disclosed in sources reviewed.
Time to results
Long (> 3 years) — Systems deployed since 2008; Chinese-character recognition added February 2017, in ongoing operation.
Staffing & skills
Hongkong Post, NEC (vendor, systems integrator)

Conditions for success

  • long-standing (~30 year) vendor relationship enabling incremental capability upgrades to existing infrastructure

Common failure modes

  • no independently audited accuracy or missort-rate figure published for the Chinese-character recognition function

Where it fits

Governance type
postal operator with private vendor
Scale
national postal service (Hong Kong)
Income level
high income (Hong Kong)

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

Attachments

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