One week before Christmas, La Poste is running at full capacity, to deliver thousands of daily packages on time under the tree. At the Amiens sorting center, 20,000 are processed on average per day during this rush period.
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In this sorting center in Amiens, thousands of packages pass through every day. A veritable hive where each agent dispatches the packages which pass by constantly. Laurent Hellegouarch, parcel delivery manager, explains how to process this peak in requests, a few days before Christmas.
“Parcels arrive to us in bulk in trucks […] They arrive on the mechanized line so that they can be sorted. They are in two directions: dispersion and distribution.“Distribution concerns Amiens and its metropolis.”There, we will be able to sort them by round to be distributed, but on site.“While the dispersion takes place from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. so that all the packages managed by the other offices are, in turn, distributed among the different rounds.
During this period of high traffic, three deliveries per day arrive with the equivalent of “7,500 packages each“Every year, a week before Christmas, traffic increases from 10,500 packages per day to 22,000. Valentin came as reinforcements to sort. “You have to be quite quick and you also have to stop the belt every four seconds so as not to send it all at once. So you have to have a certain dexterity“.
In one hour, 1,800 packages passed through the conveyor belt. The mechanics must run smoothly. To keep up, Laurent Hellegouarch is in charge of this long logistics chain. “What can slow down is reading, differences between labels, writes […] And also the processing speed. Since the point is not to stop the mechanized chain.“
The cart waltz is the last step before the packages hit the road. Patrice prepares his cargo, scanning by hand, stacking each package that finds its place. “Parcels, I don’t know how many there are.“There is not a minute to lose despite the cumulative delay. But.”It doesn’t matter, it was planned“, he assures.
For Patrice as for the 43 other parcel deliverers from Amiens, the race against time continues with a single mission, that Christmas arrives on time, without a single wrinkle.
With Camille Di Crescenzo / FTV
