From AI to drones, firms deliver industry of future

Automated, intelligent

At the Shanghai sorting center of YTO Express in Qingpu district on the municipality's outskirt, Qian Yi and his colleagues deal with parcels arriving from outside the city.

Under the scorching summer sun, conveyor belts that are part of the smart sorting system are extended into delivery trucks.

Workers place parcels on the conveyor belts one after another, ensuring that the electronic waybills face upward. This allows the automated sorting system to scan the barcode, identify the parcel's destination, and direct it to the correct location after it runs through a complex network of conveyor belts.

The cross-belt sorter consists of interconnected sections, akin to train compartments, with each section processing a single parcel. As a parcel reaches its correct position, the belt shifts and guides it into a collection bag below.

When the bags are full, workers seal them and place them on conveyor belts that carry them to trucks bound for distribution outlets.

"The conveyor belts move at a speed that can carry 240 packages per minute, which is a dizzying speed but accurate, and requires no human intervention or secondary verification," said Qian, the 29-year-old leader of the parcel-sorting team at the center.

"Sorting centers were not like this a decade ago. Manual sorting used to be labor-intensive. Workers were stationed on either side of straight conveyor belts, with each person responsible for parcels destined for a district of Shanghai. They had to be swift in both their mind and hand movements," said Qian.

Manual operations sometimes collapsed if the workload was too heavy during periods such as the "Double 11" shopping festival. "However, with the current system, the center can process up to 5 million parcels a day," he said.

Covering an area of roughly 2.5 standard soccer fields and equipped with five cross-belt sorters, the sorting center epitomizes the evolution of China's express delivery industry. "Today, most industry players headquartered in Qingpu boast an average delivery time within 45 hours nationwide at a cost of just a little more than 3 yuan per parcel. There is a saying among us: 'It costs only half a dollar to deliver a parcel nationwide'," Qian said.

Qingpu, the only Shanghai district connecting to both Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces and adjacent to the Shanghai Hongqiao international transportation hub, has become home to the national and regional headquarters of many courier companies. Of every 10 courier parcels delivered nationwide, seven are handled by Qingpu-headquartered express delivery companies.

Major players have established large technology divisions to serve as the brain of their operations. Most have automated sorting lines and remote visual management systems that connect their headquarters with business outlets nationwide.

At the big data center of YTO Express' national headquarters in Qingpu, a huge screen shows busy scenes at parcel-sorting centers nationwide, the status of thousands of moving trucks, as well as real-time tracking of the entire delivery process of all parcels from collection to dispatch.