New parcel centre will process up to 30,000 packages an hour
NZ Post has opened an automated parcel processing centre in Auckland that will be capable of processing up to 30,000 parcels per hour.
The Auckland Processing Centre in Wiri, which is the size of four football fields, was commissioned and officially opened yesterday.
The 30,000-square-metre centre will begin processing domestic parcels this week and include international parcels once the Ministry for Primary Industries and Customs start working at the site later in the year.
“This is a generational investment to ensure the ongoing success of NZ Post,” said NZ Post chief executive David Walsh.
“We are investing to meet the expected long-term growth in domestic and international ecommerce, as we continue to evolve to meet the future needs and growth ambitions of our customers.”
The Auckland centre is the third to open as part of the national mail carrier’s $200 million investment in parcel processing infrastructure. The Wellington Super Depot and the Southern Operations Centre opened in 2022.
Walsh said the state-owned enterprise had invested heavily in state-of-the-art technology to ensure better accuracy and more visibility of where parcels are in the network, which would remove manual handling.
The Auckland Processing Centre features six sorters on multiple levels, more than double the processing capacity per hour of the Auckland Operations Centre, allowing for the processing of 30,000 parcels an hour at peak capacity, compared with 13,000 an hour previously.
The new centre will help NZ Post meet its goal of increasing its parcel processing capacity to 190 million items a year by 2033.
Biosecurity New Zealand deputy director-general Stuart Anderson said new screening technology and enhanced processes at the Auckland Processing Centre for identifying biosecurity threats would reduce the chance of foreign pests and diseases arriving in New Zealand with international parcels and other mail items.
He said the centre would put New Zealand in “a strong position to respond to expected rising volumes of international mail and parcels, and changing biosecurity threats in the future”.
Customs said it would give the agency access to new technology and data tools, which would enable it to be more effective and efficient when identifying border threats and work collaboratively with the Ministry for Primary Industries and NZ Post.