Posten Sverige AB, Sweden's national postal service, has selected Lockheed Martin to upgrade its address recognition technology and mail automation capabilities for processing the nation's letter mail.

The upgraded programme will create a common recognition platform to consolidate automated sorting systems at Swedish national processing centers. In addition, it will improve the recognition technology used to process and deliver letter mail. Lockheed Martin will also integrate more than 70 legacy sorting machines to further streamline and improve automated letter sorting capabilities across the country. This new system is similar to the highly efficient Lockheed Martin-developed address interpretation system now in place at the United Kingdom's Royal Mail.

"This contract will enable automated equipment to read addresses and sequence letter mail more efficiently, while providing postal workers with online access to data for optimum system management," said Ian Hawkins, Managing Director of Lockheed Martin's UK Distribution Technologies business based in Havant, United Kingdom. "This programme is an essential part of Posten's next generation recognition and automation improvement effort to increase efficiency in their mail system."

"We see this as an important step for further improving efficiency and advancing our operations," said Goran Sallqvist, Executive Vice President, Posten AB.

Lockheed Martin will provide Sweden's national postal service with new technology to automate machine printed and handwritten mail sorting pieces. It will automatically recognise and identify additional attributes on mail pieces such as stamp, class and meter marks. The system also will resolve ancillary information such as delivery classification and will provide a new mail forwarding service to improve business performance.

The new system, called Gemensam Las Plattform (GLP), will replace machine- specific optical character recognition and video coding systems. The nationwide upgrade will extend the life of existing equipment and improve the recognition capabilities across all sorting machines. While the system is currently focused on letter mail, ultimately other mail processing operations for packets, parcels, magazines and catalogues, known as "flats" will be improved.

The GLP system, which is part of a larger re-engineering project to streamline mail processing in Sweden, is a prerequisite to future sequence sorting upgrades in the Post's long-term transformation plan.

Lockheed Martin UK, a unit of Lockheed Martin Corporation, is a leader in systems integration working on major programmes spanning the aerospace, defence, civil and commercial sectors. In the UK, Lockheed Martin has annual sales in the range of 400-600 pounds Sterling million working with more than 100 business partners. Lockheed Martin employs over 1,000 people at 15 sites across the UK.

Headquartered in Bethesda, MD, Lockheed Martin employs about 130,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture and integration of advanced technology systems, products and services.

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SOURCE: Lockheed Martin