Photo: Beumer
With the increasing importance of e-commerce, the Norwegian parcel delivery service Helthjem was able to expand rapidly. Its market share now stands at 15 percent. Previously, the young company relied on manual sorting of shipments. Now, it aims to process 50 million shipments per year automatically.
In Vestby, southern Norway, Beumer will equip a new parcel terminal with state-of-the-art technology for Helthjem in a production hall covering approximately 12,000 square meters. This is Helthjem's first investment in automated sorting. The company aims to counteract the increasing labor shortage with this system. The sorter is equipped with automatically tilting wire mesh containers and parcel singulation. The system handles the majority of the handling process at the terminal – from the initial feeding of parcels into the machine, through sorting, to further distribution.
With the new system, Helthjem says it can largely eliminate manual handling. Previously, four to five "touchpoints" were required for each package. In other words, each item had to be handled four to five times before it found its way to the correct destination. This is now reduced to just one handling. This has a tremendous impact on the speed and accuracy of throughput, says Lars Beier Madsen, Head of Sales for Logistics Systems at Beumer. "We are delighted to be able to support Helthjem on their automation journey."
This is what confidence looks like: Angen (left), Madsen
Helthjem was founded in 2015 and initially specialized in newspaper delivery. The company built an extensive network, enabling it to expand its business to include express parcel delivery. Helthjem currently handles 16 million parcels per year and is able to deliver to half of Norway's population within twelve hours.
“For years we have worked entirely manually,” says Anders Lunde Angen, Director of E-Commerce at Helthjem. “At first we had concerns (…) but the system will allow us to expand our offerings quickly. We expect a relatively fast ROI.”
The system is expected to go into operation in the summer of 2023 – initially with a capacity of 15,000 packages per hour. However, the concept can be expanded at any time.
