NZ Post Opens Brand New ‘Super Depot’ In Wellington

NZ Post has today officially opened a brand new ‘Super Depot’ in Wellington as part of its 10-year ‘Te Iho’ investment plan to meet ongoing parcel growth.

NZ Post Chief Executive David Walsh says NZ Post is incredibly proud to be opening the Wellington Super Depot that will use state-of-the art sortation technology to scan and sort parcels at a super-fast rate.

“The Wellington Super Depot is our first automated processing hub in the lower North Island and the first to be built from the ground up. This is the single largest material handling investment programme within New Zealand in recent history. This investment will allow us to process parcels more efficiently and accurately through automated sortation and address reading technology,” Walsh said.

“With all trends indicating that online shopping is here to stay, we’reinvesting over $200 million across our networkso we canincrease our parcel processingcapacityacross the country to 190 million parcels annually by 2033. We’re growing from two automated sorting centres in Auckland and Christchurch, up to 11 of varying sizes across the country, if parcel volumes continue to grow. This gives us greater ability to scale our business to match the growth of parcels into the future and deliver great service to our customers, and their customers,” Walsh said.

NZ Post Wellington Super Depot Manager Shirley Povey says her team are very excited to work from the new depot. “The Wellington Super Depot has a processing floor of just over 10,000 square metres – that’s bigger than the size of a rugby field, or 8 Olympic sized swimming pools – and will process up to 11,000 parcels per hour. These will be sorted for our couriers using our new automated system, which sends thousands of parcels to the correct chute ready for our couriers to load up and deliver to our customers across the region,” Povey said.

The new scanning and sorting technology, designed and produced in partnership with Daifuku Oceania, will mean NZ Post has greater visibility of where parcels are at any given time in its network.

“Our new Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology will read labels, including handwriting, to extract the information it needs to then talk to the sorter to send parcels down the right chute. At the moment this is done manually through video coding,” Povey said.

Sustainability was also a central consideration for the Wellington Super Depot site, alongside other new NZ Post depots across Aotearoa. All building materials and appliances have been selected with sustainability in mind. The site has thermal insulation and has been built using products with the environmental choice tick. The site has on-site storm water detention ponds and rain-water harvesting. The carpet tiles are 100% biodegradable and electrical appliances have a minimum 4-star energy rating.

“We are proud to continue to rise to the challenge of being the best delivery business for New Zealand, and the critical role NZ Post has in the recovery and growth of the New Zealand economy,” NZ Post Chief Executive David Walsh said.

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