New Brisbane facility to service expanding e-commerce trade.

Australia Post claims its new parcel facility in Brisbane is a major step in the company’s transformation from a letter business to a growing ecommerce delivery and services organisation.

The size of eight football fields and with over 500 people (and robots) employed on site,  the facility will be able to process 700,000 parcels per day at full capacity.

Australia Post group chief operating officer, Bob Black, said, “Australians love online shopping, spending $27.5 billion nationally online last year and this facility will be able to process those parcels more efficiently right across the network – getting it from merchant to customer quicker.”

“Queenslanders are big online shoppers, with three of the top 10 postcodes – Toowoomba, Mackay, Bundaberg – each experiencing strong growth all above 20 per cent in 2018.”

“What we’re also finding is that shoppers are jumping online earlier to snap up deals in annual online sales events, which means we’re getting bigger volumes, earlier in the peak period,” he said.

Last year Australia Post delivered over 40 million parcels in December, and on two occasions delivered more than 3 million parcels in a day. This year, volumes are already greater than they were at the same time last year – with the period around Mother’s Day already the biggest since Christmas.

Over the coming peak Australia Post expects to deliver up to 3.5 million parcels on its busiest day, facilitated by a national $900 million, three-year investment in infrastructure and automation.

The $240 million investment in the flagship facility comes complete with two Beumer high-speed sorters capable of processing over 50,000 parcels per hour, four robotic arms that can together clear 320 cages per hour, a parcel picker that can move 2,500 parcels per hour, and 23 automated guided vehicles that can lift and move objects weighing up to 1.4 tonnes each then place them down to an accuracy of ~5mm.