Each region of the country has its own branch of Russian Post - the regional department of the federal postal service. All branches are divided geographically into ten macro-regions. The total number of post offices exceeds 40 thousand. There are two branches in Moscow and the Moscow region, united into the Moscow macroregion. Also located on the territory of the region is the Vnukovo logistics center, which processes international mail, and an automated sorting center(ASC), located near Podolsk. In them, parcels and letters are distributed and sent to post offices of six regions - Tver, Tula, Vladimir, Ryazan, Kaluga, Moscow. If a client from the ASC service area sent a letter, for example, to Vladivostok, then his letter will first go to the Podolsk ASC, and then go to the main sorting center in the Far East. Where it will already be sorted to the final recipient. The Village went to an automated sorting center in Podolsk (the largest in Russia and Eastern Europe) to see how they sort letters and parcels.

What happens at the sorting center

The automated center serves the six regions closest to it. This means that it sorts ordinary letters, registered letters and parcels into regional post offices by post office. Outgoing shipments from these areas for recipients from all over Russia are also processed here. After the envelope fell into Mailbox, they take it out and bring it to the post office, where the letter is inspected and the date of sending is set. Then the postal containers with letters are taken to the sorting center.

In total, 1,650 people work there, about 350 employees per shift; the center’s area can be compared to a large factory - it occupies 29 thousand square meters. The sorting center operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week and seven days a week. The conveyor only stops during maintenance hours. The equipment here is Italian.

The majority of the center's dispatches in Podolsk are letters from different companies(including government organizations, for example fines from the traffic police) and catalogues. Parcels, parcels, EMS shipments, registered, valuable letters and first class departures. The sorting time is 21 hours, during which time the shipment must travel from the entrance to the dispatch. About 3 million pass through the center every day postal items. The hottest season is April-May, when all kinds of congratulations from the state are sent, and, of course, November-December - when everyone sends gifts and New Year's letters.

Photos

Yasya Vogelgardt

How to speed up work

The company says that the delivery time for letters and parcels has been reduced. This happened thanks to two things - automation and logistics. In the first case, the construction of an automated sorting center in Vnukovo helped, where manual labor is minimized and all parcels are sorted using special equipment. According to employees, now from the moment of entering the international departure center until departure to the country, no more than 22 hours pass. Previously, such parcels could lie for days. In addition, the new Russian Post team reviewed the routes and removed unnecessary points from them. For example, if previously a resident of Ryazan sent a letter to the addressee in his city, then the letter was first sent for sorting to Moscow and only after that was returned. Now such shipments are sorted within the city.

How letters are sorted

First, operators scan the barcode and register the cargo. So, in a special program, information appears about what type of mail and how much it was received. The data is also uploaded to the official website of Russian Post, where the client, knowing the identifier (alphanumeric image for international parcels and digital for domestic Russian ones), can find out the location of his shipment. All containers are distributed between departments - written correspondence, parcels and express shipments. In the express shipment workshop, the sorting process is partially automated: operators read each barcode with a hand-held scanner, find out the address and put it in a bag that goes to the desired city. According to employees, this is because most express items are irregular in shape, so manual sorting is more acceptable.

Manual labor is also involved in sorting regular letters, but it is not much. There is also equipment for sorting large format letters. First, such letters are faceted - operators put them in boxes so that they are located on the same side to each other. Then the stacks are loaded onto a sorting machine: the items fly along a conveyor, a scanner reads the address from each and distributes them according to directions into cells. This happens quite quickly - 12 letters are processed per second. If the address or index is written illegibly or contains some errors, the scanner sends a photo of this letter to the video encoding section. Employees of this department continuously manually enter indexes from images of letters. To do this, you need to have a quick reaction - to be able to deal with the letter in no more than 30 seconds, since it is during this time that the sorting machine makes several circles. In addition, employees need to know the index range for the whole of Russia in order to deal with discrepancies between the index and address, for example. Of course, if the address is something like “grandfather’s village,” then the letter will be returned to the sender.

Then the letters are taken out of the cells, and the operator places the items in blue branded boxes, sticks labels with the addresses of branches or post offices and places the boxes on the conveyor belt. Here the final stages await them - formation into containers, loading and shipping.

What happens to parcels

Parcels are distributed by six automated lines. The first one is for international shipments- customs cleared shipments from Vnukovo are received here for addressees living in the entire ASC service area, except Moscow. For Moscow, shipments are sorted directly at the Vnukovo center. The outermost belt is intended for oversized cargo, and the rest are for standard parcels. All items are manually loaded onto a high-speed conveyor belt, which moves at a speed of 2.2 meters per second. Boxes and parcels are automatically scanned and sorted into 320 outputs that correspond to different post offices. There is a mesh installed under the conveyor belt - sometimes due to the high speed of the conveyor and slippery packaging, parcels slide down. Therefore, the operator regularly checks the grid and returns the parcels to the sorting belt.

In the place where containers with parcels are unloaded and loaded, there are Yantar installations. They check shipments for radioactive emissions and explosion hazards. If a package seems suspicious to the operator, he cannot open it himself, but must hand it over to the security service. In general, verification of domestic shipments usually takes place at post offices when submitting the shipment for delivery.

The package has been added to the site
This means that the parcel does not yet have any status either from the post office of the sending country or from the post office of the recipient country.

Information about the parcel was received electronically
The seller assigned a tracking number to the parcel and registered it on the post office website. But I haven’t delivered the parcel to the post office yet.
It may take from 2 to 14 days before it begins to be tracked.

Received by mail
The parcel arrived at the post office, i.e. the seller brought it to the post office, where it was registered and sent to the recipient.

Transferred to customs
The postal item was handed over to the customs service of the sending state for inspection and other customs procedures. If the parcel passes the customs check successfully, it will be sent to the destination country.

Customs clearance completed, released by customs
If the parcel passes the customs check successfully, it will be sent to the destination country.

Left mail (Export)
Operation “Export” means that the shipment has been transferred to the carrier. The delivery time from export to import is usually the longest and it can take quite a long time before the postal item reaches the territory of the recipient country.
Reasons: transit routes of flights, gaining a certain weight for sending by cargo planes. For example, China and Singapore transport mail using cargo planes that can weigh between 50 and 100 tons. While the shipment is being exported, neither the sending country nor the recipient country can track the shipment online.
Delivery times for international shipments between export and import are not established (not regulated by documents). The delivery route is determined by the country of origin of the shipment, depending on existing agreements with air carriers and the availability of carrying capacity. During delivery, transit flights are used, which leads to an increase in transportation times and the time between export and import operations.

Import
The parcel is registered in the country of destination. A period of 30 days between export and import is normal.

Transferred to customs
The status means that the shipment has been transferred to the Federal Customs Service (FCS) for clearance. At MMPO, shipments undergo a full cycle of processing, customs control and clearance functions. Postal containers arrive under the customs transit procedure. They are then sorted by type and transferred to various areas. Shipments with product contents undergo X-ray inspection. By decision of the customs officer, the postal item may be opened for personal control, the reason for personal control may be violations of property rights, a commercial consignment, targeting a consignment that may contain substances prohibited for shipment. The postal item is opened by the operator in the presence of a customs officer, after which a customs inspection report is drawn up and attached to the item.

Detained by customs
This operation means that the postal item is detained by FCS employees to carry out measures to determine the purpose of the postal item. When receiving goods by international mail during a calendar month, the customs value of which exceeds 1000 euros, and (or) the total weight of which exceeds 31 kilograms, in part of such excess, it is necessary to pay customs duties and taxes using a flat rate of 30% of the customs value of the goods , but not less than 4 euros per 1 kilogram of their weight. If information about the goods sent to the MPO is missing or does not correspond to the actual information, this significantly increases the time spent on processing shipments, since there is a need to conduct a customs inspection and document its results.

Customs clearance completed
This operation means that customs checked the shipment and returned it to Russian Post. In many MMPOs, customs works around the clock: this is the only way to check the colossal volume of mail incoming from abroad in a timely manner. Each customs officer is assisted by two postal operators.

Left MMPO (place of international postal exchange)
The shipment has left the place of international postal exchange and is then sent to the sorting center. From the moment the shipment leaves the MMPO, delivery times for shipments within Russia begin to apply; they depend on the type of shipment http://www.russianpost.ru/rp/servise/ru/home/postuslug/termsdelivery

Arrived at the sorting center / Left the sorting center
After leaving the MMPO, items travel through large postal sorting centers through the territory of the recipient country to their destination. At the sorting center, mail is distributed along the main routes of the country. The parcels are resealed in containers and sent to the delivery location, to the awaiting recipient.

Arrived at the delivery location
The shipment has arrived at the recipient's post office. As soon as the item arrives at the department, employees issue a notice (notification) that the item is in the department. The notice is given to the postman for delivery. Delivery is carried out on the day the item arrives at the department or the next day (for example, if the item arrived at the department in the evening).

Dosyl. Submission.
Shipping - the parcel was sent to the wrong postcode.
Dosyl - we found an error and redirected the parcel to the correct address.

Automatic sorting of letters appeared in the USSR back in the 60s. Then about 180 letter-sorting machines were put into operation, and the population was taught to write indexes on envelopes. But with the beginning of the 90s, Russia switched to the European format for writing postal addresses, for which the machines were not adapted. As a result, Post was forced to return to manual sorting.

In June 2011, Russian Post launched an automated sorting center in St. Petersburg, designed to process 1.7 million letters and parcels per day from four regions of the north-west (St. Petersburg, Leningrad, Novgorod and Pskov regions). As a result, delivery times for letters in the region have been significantly reduced. For example, the standard for St. Petersburg is only 2 days.

Correspondence within one region first sent to the center - this is faster than sorting and registering letters on site. All paper correspondence is automatically divided into standard (by size) and non-standard letters. After that, they are automatically laid facing one way, taking into account the direction of the text in the address part, then the machine applies a calendar stamp to the letters.

The letters, sorted by size, are placed in containers and sent to a machine for coding. At the beginning of the process, coding machines convert a numeric or alphabetic address into a symbolic code that is printed on the letter. Next, the encoded information about the postal address is scanned by a device for reading characters (the equipment also supports Cyrillic alphabet recognition). If it is impossible to recognize the index or address, the scanned image is sent to the monitor to operators who enter the information manually. After this, the letters are automatically divided into address cells. Removal of boxes with sorted mail and preparation of documents for sending is carried out manually.

The manual letter sorting area receives mail that cannot be processed by an automatic machine, for example, due to a packaging defect, an incorrectly written address, or an inappropriate attachment inside the letter (not from a censorship point of view, but because it could damage the machine or packaging). Correspondence is sorted by index. Depending on the address, the operator places them in certain cells.

The sorting area processes about 8 thousand parcels per hour. The operator installs them on the line, after which they are weighed. If the weight is acceptable according to the standards (up to 20 kg), the parcel is read by the scanner and gets onto the tape; if not, the machine stops and manual labor is involved.

After the package has passed along the conveyor belt, it falls into a specific cell, which is assigned a barcode. This is done to ensure that parcels do not get lost along the way. All information about the shipment thus falls into unified system Russian Posts.

Sorted mail is loaded into cars and transported to departments. Trucks come here 2 times a day: in the morning and in the evening. Parcels and letters are taken into different rooms and registered. In the delivery department, letters are manually stamped with the date, time of receipt and post office coordinates. Next, the operator puts them in boxes with the number of the station, from where the newspapers and letters are picked up by postmen.

Registered letters and the parcels are weighed and entered into the special program. It allows you to track the status of the parcel (you can view it on the official website of the Russian Post, provided that you know your postal item number). Next they write out postal notices, and the parcels themselves are taken to the warehouse. Shelf life is a month. If the recipient is never found, they are returned to the addressee.

Every Russian lover of online shopping sooner or later has to deal with the state postal operator of the Russian Federation - the Russian Post enterprise. How successful and efficient this communication is depends not only on luck, but also on the user’s awareness. "Forewarned is forearmed". Yes, there are moments that the recipient of the mail cannot influence, but a whole series of troubles could have been avoided by familiarizing himself in advance with the basic rules and principles of the Russian Post.

Some general information

Russian Post in its organizational structure is a Federal State Unitary Enterprise (abbreviated as FSUE). The company does the same thing as its predecessor, the Ministry of Communications Russian Federation– provision of postal services to individuals and legal entities.

Main types of postal services: domestic and international. As a rule, sending postal items within the country is not accompanied by any problems. Therefore, we will focus on the organizational aspects of international shipping. International postal items are divided into:

• written correspondence (including small packages weighing up to 2 kg);
• parcels (weight limit – 20 kg).

The activities of the Russian Post in the field of international postal services are regulated by the Universal Postal Union, abbreviated as UPU or UPU (from the English Universal Postal Union). The UPU includes Russia, as well as 190 other countries of the world, which, when exchanging postal messages with each other, comply with the rules established by the Universal Postal Convention (developed on the basis of the Charter of the Universal Postal Union, adopted in 1964).

In each country that is part of the UPU, in addition to the national postal operator, there is its subsidiary division - the express delivery service. In Russia, such a service is EMS Russian Post. According to the rules of interaction between members of the UPU, a postal item accepted by the national postal operator is also transferred when crossing the border to the postal operator of another country. Accordingly, if you sent a parcel via EMS, then in the recipient’s country it will automatically fall into the hands of the express delivery service.

Express delivery differs from the work of a regular postal operator in several ways. First, these services have separate, unconnected triage centers. Secondly, delivery by Russian Post is carried out to the post office closest to the addressee, while EMS couriers deliver the item directly to the home address. Third, maximum size international mail sent by express delivery service is not 20, but 30 kg. Of course, delivery times and service costs also differ significantly.

"Pitfalls" of international shipping

Customs clearance

When processing incoming international shipments, customs authorities monitor their contents and the need to collect customs duties. Any postal item arriving in Russia from another country undergoes this procedure at special international postal exchange points - the so-called MMPO. There are currently 24 such points in Russia. Most often, customs clearance takes place unnoticed by the recipient of the parcel, but it also happens that upon receipt you have to pay an additional amount of customs duty. Since 2010, uniform customs tariffs have been in effect in the Russian Federation, regardless of which organization processed the postal clearance.

The basic forwarding rule also applies here - if your shipment is delivered to the border by the state postal service of another country, then in Russia customs clearance will also be handled by the state postal operator, that is, “Russian Post”. If the parcel is delivered by express delivery service, then this service either deals with customs procedures itself or leaves the decision on this issue to the recipient, depending on the specific agreement.

Postal tracking

If it is possible to track the stages of delivery, all postal items are divided into registered and unregistered. Registered parcels and small packages receive a special alphanumeric number, by which you can determine their location at any time using special sites on the Internet - services of various postal operators. According to the rules, this unique number must be insured against repetition for one year.

If you are sending a parcel courier service EMS Russian Post, it will definitely be registered and receive its own identifier. This rule does not apply to small packages, but if such a package is nevertheless registered, the first character of its number will be the letter R (from the word r registered).

The last two characters in the number indicate the country from which the package was sent. For example, a unique US mailing number would look something like this: CQ987654321US.

Thus, you can track the movement of the shipment you are interested in only if you know mail ID(it is also called tracking number).

In the event that a shipment classified as unregistered arrives into the territory of the Russian Federation from abroad, the national postal operator assigns it an internal tracking number, which constitutes proprietary information and is not communicated to either the sender or the recipient.

Services for tracking items sent by Russian Post and EMS Russian Post differ from each other and are located directly on the websites of these organizations. However, the principle of their operation is approximately the same: the tracking number is entered into the appropriate field and the final action button is clicked (on the Russian Post website you will also have to first enter a code to protect against automatic filling). After this, if the system has information about your postal item, it will be available to you. Unfortunately, the relevance of this information is not always one hundred percent - in fact, the package may already have passed the stage that is displayed by the service. This means that the data was simply not entered on time.

If you decide to use any of the alternative services that provide information about the fate of postal items, keep in mind that they all turn to information system postal operator.

The information displayed when prompted for an ID contains information about the status of the mail item. The status corresponds to passing a certain stage of the transfer. For example: “reception”, “export”, “import”, “transferred to customs”, “left the place international exchange", "left the sorting center", "arrived at the place of delivery", etc. Each of them speaks for itself, and the status description indicates the place, date and time of the last recorded action that occurred with your mail item.

Lost item

If at any stage of the shipment the status of the shipment does not change for a very long time, and the package does not arrive to you either, it is worth taking action to find it. To do this, you should draw up an appropriate statement, which can come from both the recipient and the sender. For such applications, post offices have special forms that must be filled out with information about the lost item. In addition, the form must be accompanied by a document confirming shipment (if you do not have one, ask the sender for it). Acceptance of the search application is confirmed by a tear-off coupon issued to the applicant.

In addition, you have the right to make a written complaint about the quality of postal service services and send it to the Claims Department of the Main Long-Range Transportation Center of the Russian Post. Address Email this department can be easily found on the Internet. In addition, you can complain to the quality control department of the regional branch of the Russian Post, as well as to the consumer rights protection department of the regional department of the Rospotrebnadzor service.

If you needed current postal forms, such as, for example, customs declarations for international mail CN22 or CN23, form 107 “inventory of attachments”, form form 22 (notice to receive IPO) and any other detailed instructions Once completed, you can always receive them in a special section of the official website of the Russian Post. Don't take risks by downloading forms from third-party sites! They may be outdated or infected with virus programs.

Receiving an opened or damaged package

A sign that the shipment has been opened is not only obvious signs of opening, but also a discrepancy in weight with the external integrity of the package. If the discrepancy in weight is insignificant, it can be attributed to an objective reason - a discrepancy in the readings of postal scales as a result of their insufficient calibration. If the difference in the weight of the parcel causes concern, ask the employees of the department (courier service) to immediately draw up a report with detailed description situations. A report is also drawn up if signs of damage to the packaging are detected (even if the weight of the parcel corresponds to that indicated in the notice). Keep in mind that after actually drawing up and signing such an act, you have the right to demand that postal service employees open and check the shipment until your signature is affixed, indicating that you have received the parcel. The head of the post office or his deputy must be present during the opening. Upon the fact of the autopsy, a report must also be drawn up (form No. 51). Nowadays, it is recommended to record the moment of opening a parcel in a photo or video. If the contents of the parcel are found missing, damaged or missing, you will receive a copy of the document and the parcel will be returned to the sender.

Delivery period

Oddly enough, there are control deadlines for the delivery of postal items by Russian Post - they were approved by the relevant decree of the Government of the Russian Federation back in 2006. These times vary depending on the destination and method of transportation (ground or air). In particular, the delivery time for ground shipments across Russia ranges from 8 to 20 days, and the day of arrival from the sender’s country is not included in this amount. As you know, for a number of reasons, deadlines can be violated, especially often during the pre-holiday period, when the load on postal services increases sharply.

As for the EMS Russian Post courier service, its delivery deadlines are specified only in internal documents. If you wish, you can calculate the time it takes to send the item between Russian cities. To do this, you should use the “calculator” - an option available on the official website of the EMS service.

Receipt time

In addition to the delivery time, there is also a control period for delivery of the postal item to the recipient - it is 30 days and is counted from the day the parcel arrives at the final post office. The received parcel is registered, then the recipient is sent a notice (form No. 22), which is usually not handed over personally, but dropped into a mailbox. The notice indicates the name of the item, the country of the sender, the tracking number, as well as the weight of the postal item. If necessary, a second notification is issued 5 days after the initial notification. At the end of the 30-day period, if the recipient is not announced, the parcel is considered unclaimed and is sent back to the address of its sender.

Receiving process

The addressee to whose name the notification of the parcel was received must fill in the appropriate fields in it with information about the document proving his identity. The list of identification documents (in addition to a civil passport) is given in the Federal Law “On Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights and the Right to Participate in a Referendum of Citizens of the Russian Federation.”

The “Registered” field is filled in only if the address to which the item was delivered does not match the registration address.

To receive a postal item, a completed notice along with an identification document (exactly the one whose details are indicated by the recipient on the form) is presented at post office. Only after you are convinced that the parcel was delivered intact and with exactly the weight indicated on the notice, should you put the current date on the form and your signature confirming receipt. It is from this moment that the postal item with all its contents officially becomes your property.

Receipt process upon delivery by courier service

Mail sent by EMS is delivered directly to the address specified by the sender. If the addressee is not there, a notice is left for him with detailed information about the parcel and contact details of the courier service. The recipient can call and agree on the exact delivery time or pick up the shipment themselves from the service office.

To receive a package delivered by courier service, you will also need an identification document, as well as a thorough inspection of what you receive to ensure it is not damaged.

If any type of violation is detected during the shipping process, request the execution of all necessary documents, which will later become your evidence in any controversial issues regarding compensation for damage caused.

Do not forget that the state postal operator Russian Post is responsible to citizens using postal services for the preservation and timely delivery of postal items. You can learn more about the responsibility of the postal service in Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation dated April 15, 2005 No. 221, as well as in Chapter 21 of the Universal Postal Convention and Chapter 6 of the Rules for the provision of postal services.

Contact information of the Russian Post, telephone numbers, accounts and groups on social networks

Phone number help desk Russian Post: 8 800 2005 888.

EMS Russian Post help desk phone number: 8 800 2005 055.

Official website of the company EMS Post Russia: http://www.emspost.ru.

Official community of Russian Post VKontakte.

December 24th, 2014

In November 2013, the Russian media reported in the background that Russian Post had opened a new logistics center for processing international mail.

The news passed in the background, but even by the New Year 2013/2014 celebration, thanks to this center, it was possible to avoid the previously standard pre-New Year collapse for Russian Post with delays in parcels and mail arriving from abroad.

By the end of 2014, the new logistics center reached full capacity and now processes up to 300,000 shipments per day!

Now everything you ordered for the New Year will actually be in your hands for the New Year, and not for the new school year)))

Thanks to the community mosblog I was able to go on a specially organized excursion to this site and see everything with my own eyes.

Let's get a look!

In the photo below you can see that the Russian Post is not going to stop there, because everything that I have already described is located only in the 1st building!

And there are 6 of them in total! So Russian Post is going to grow and expand even more:

1.

Conducted a tour of the sorting (aka logistics) center Alexey Skatin, deputy general director FSUE Russian Post with its colleagues.

2.

Here he is! :)

3.

The security at the sorting center is adequate!

4.

And, believe me, everyone at the Post Office understands everything. New Year, everyone is waiting for the parcel and quickly.

That's why... :) we set a reminder:

5.

But we didn’t come here for the Christmas trees.

The fact is that now this center processes about half of the entire Russian volume of international mail. The incoming flow of this mail.

And this was possible only thanks to modern technologies and a high level of automation.

Moreover, this is generally the first such facility in Russia in which customs clearance of international postal items is combined with their automated sorting by delivery directions. But we’ll talk about customs separately.

Take a better look at this giant with sparkling red eyes:

6.

No, this is not an automatic burner of your mail, and not even a system for entangling mail in Russian Post warehouses :) A couple of years ago, Russian Post, including thanks to new personnel (such as Alexey Skatin), abandoned this direction :)))

A couple of years ago, Russian Post set a course for a total change in old processes and installation of new equipment.

For example, in this logistics and sorting center the following were installed:

Multisorter for all types of postal items
-Conveyor systems for transporting bags, parcels and boxes
-Mobile conveyors with retractable sections
-Multi-beam scanners for reading information and devices for sorting items by size
-And others Newest technologies, which allows you to automate and speed up the process of processing shipments as much as possible

Naturally, it’s not 2115 yet, and the process cannot be completed without people:

7.

8.

Here, postal items are scanned to put a mark in the system that they have arrived in Russia and will now be sent for customs clearance.

Yes, the parcel is flying :) More on this later.

9.

A little out of order, but this is how customs unloads and controls the arrival of a certain volume of parcels into Russian territory:

10.

By the way, this bag is from China - I've mostly only seen them.

The flow of shipments from China is very large:

11.

Then the bags are delivered to the managers of incoming bags))) I don't know what these people's positions are called, but they do important work:

They take the parcel out of the bag, point the scanner at the sticker on it, all the information is automatically entered into the computer, and they do a quick check to see if the information on the sticker was scanned correctly. If everything is fine, then click “OK”, and a mark is placed in the Russian Post tracking that your shipment is now located in Russia.

Your shipment is placed on a belt and goes into the customs scanner.

12.

“How does it leave if nothing leaves?!”, you ask looking at the photo above.

Yes, there are such clusters.

And now, I’ll surprise you, but this is for your own good.

The fact is that 300,000 shipments per day is a very heavy load. And if people start making mistakes, then you will not receive your parcel soon. And what needs to be done to prevent people from making mistakes?

The right thing to do is to comply with working conditions. (not the only condition, of course, but very important)

The rules for work breaks are posted for everyone to see! Depending on the load level, everyone is given a certain number of breaks. And this is being monitored.

Therefore, in the photo you can see that on one side a few parcels have already accumulated. It's really not much, believe me.

Here are the rules. I was especially pleased with the cats showing exercises for the eyes))) If there are cats, then everything will definitely be fine with Russian Post:

13.

As I already wrote, this is the first facility in which customs clearance of international mail is combined with their automated sorting by delivery directions.

For the first time in Russian history managed to unite the Russian Post and the Customs Service under one roof in a single process!

For example, in Japan these are completely different processes located in different places.

14.

Immediately after the mark of arrival in Russia, the mail is sent to the scanner to the customs officers:

15.

If nothing illegal is found there, then your parcel automatically receives a status in the tracking system indicating that the customs check has been passed and the parcel has been sorted.

16.

But in some cases, your parcel will definitely be opened!

For example, this incident happened right during the excursion:

17.

If I remember correctly, only with me a knife passed through the scanner and 2 were already unpacked!

In general, thanks to such verification, several dozen criminal cases were opened, and some characters were even sent to prison... Such cases. So you shouldn't order any illegal things.

If the parcel is opened, everything becomes more complicated and the parcel will take a long time to arrive. Since in this case, everything needs to be photographed, recorded, etc. In general, in this case, paperwork cannot be avoided, even if everything is legal.

In other cases, all incoming shipments have a sticker on which one half is intended for scanning by the sending side, the second for scanning by the Russian side.

18.

If customs has no questions, they scan the sticker and...voila! Customs cleared :)

Well, maybe there are some other nuances, but overall it’s something like this :)

19.

And immediately after clearing customs, Russian Post employees put the items into trays and send them to a sorting machine:

20.

By the way, all zones in the center are divided by numbers. And each employee works only in his or her area of ​​responsibility:

21.

And taking into account the fact that the customs office is located right there, there is even a fence between the zones!

In the panorama below (*you can click on it and look at it in higher resolution!) you can see these fences.

If any package crosses this fence, without registering at customs, then this is smuggling. And smuggling is punishable in accordance with the criminal code! Roughly speaking, the area behind the fence from the sorting machine is like a conditionally neutral space BEFORE Russia. That is, what is behind the fence is actually already in Russia, but legally not yet.

22.

In the panorama you can also see that parcels are traveling upward along the travelator.

At the top, they fall under the all-seeing eye of a scanner, which reads information from the label on the parcel:

23.

Based on the reading results, the parcel is sent to the conveyor, and the information about the reading results is processed in a computer, which determines where exactly the parcel should be sent down for dispatch.

At the entrance of the parcel to the conveyor there is another scanner, which determines which carriage the scanned parcel landed on:

24.

This magical process happens like this:

And now, as promised, let’s get back to flying parcels :)

In the photo below, I even photographed this incredible process))) I couldn’t resist.

And, naturally, I asked Alexey Skatin a question about how legal and adequate this is.

It turned out that negotiations were held separately with the Chinese Post and subsequent enormous work was carried out to standardize the packaging of the parcel! That is, each parcel is packaged in such a way that it cannot be damaged. And your parcels remain safe. This applies to all parcels. But only parcels up to a certain weight and without certain markings can fly.

If your parcel is labeled or written “caution”, “glass”, “do not throw”, “handle with care”, etc. then they will only work with it manually! The same applies to parcels with heavy weight.

25.

Despite what is happening in the photo above. I personally observed how the same woman carried some parcels by hand. Even when it was very inconvenient for her due to the crooked cages for the parcels. And then she abandoned the others again.

That is, it really works. After all, for example, there is no point in manually carrying phone cases. But it’s definitely not worth abandoning some heavy items.

Moreover, if employees are found to be violating this rule, they will lose a large part of their remuneration for their work.

By the way, in the photo above and below the so-called "Hospital" for parcels :)

Parcels come here, if for some reason they cannot be processed by the sorting machine, then here they are “treated”, errors on the label are corrected, a new one is printed, glued, and sent to the sorting machine again.

26.

Judging by the photo of “Hospital” above, the rule of rest is strictly observed :) I think this is good. I wouldn’t want mail to be processed by angry, unrested and inattentive people.

Below is a photo of the sorting center plan.

My photo blurred, of course, but the main thing is clear - the Shipping Zone (1) for processing and the Reception Zone (10) (that is, sending further across Russia) of already processed parcels are located on opposite sides of the complex. This ensures the correct step-by-step passage and processing of parcels through this complex. Well, it becomes almost impossible to confuse something.

27.

And this is the central one touch monitor control of this powerful machine.

The areas where something is going wrong immediately light up in a certain color. Or everything lights up green - this means that everything is fine:

28.

Here you can see how each of the carriages on the conveyor is doing, and which carriage contains what. If a carriage travels over the cargo for too long without sorting it, it is marked with a different color. And in 99% of cases, the machine itself sends parcels that it cannot sort to the “hospital”.

29.

This whole gigantic machine costs about 5,000,000 euros.

And its energy consumption, as they say, is only that of several irons;)

And here, in the photo below, you can see the diagram of the entire machine and influence its performance. For example, speed up the rotation of the conveyor :) Or stop everything.

By the way, this machine uses modern carriages, either magnetic or with magnetic bases of some kind, to help sort mail. Plus, the surface of the carriages is made of such material that trays with parcels do not slip off.

For example, in Germany, wooden carriages are used in sorting centers because... these centers were built there more than 30 years ago!

30.

And on this screen you can see the “pulse” of the sorting machine.

As you can see, there are no failures or failures, there were only a couple of parcels that accidentally landed on 2 carriages at once:

31.

Here they are, parcels, riding at high altitudes, waiting to be sorted:

32.

When they reach the desired slide, the carriage throws them straight to an employee who sorts the items into bags for sending to your home!

33.

There are enough slides for everyone! :)

34.

Some packages even have to wait as long as 15 minutes! :)

For Russian Post, this is a speed close to the speed of light, compared to what it was just 2 years ago:

35.

Now pay attention to how the last stage goes.

Russian Post decided to step over the 30-50 year delay gap and immediately step into the future:

36.

Each employee at the sorting hump has a special scanner with a device attached to his hand and finger:

37.

Each parcel that comes down the slide is scanned and its passage at this stage is noted, after which it is thrown into a bag in a certain direction.

After this, the tracking system will show a status indicating that the parcel has been sent from Moscow to your region:

38.

I even found my home region here :)

39.

After filling the bag, it is placed in a cage and brought to the gate:

40.

41.

After the implementation of this sorting center the number of complaints against Russian Post has decreased by 25%!

The quality assessment according to some international standards before the implementation of this center was equal to, funny to say, 3.5%! Three and a half! :))) And now this figure is 90%!

By the way, the transit time for such a shipment in Moscow was reduced to 3 days. I'll have to check it out in person sometime :)

And below is the last photo! Panorama! You can and should click on it to view it in a larger size.

By the way, on the left, under the number nine, and a little to the right, you can see special catching nets for those items that you forgot to put on the tray (they then slide off). Let's look at the latest beauty photo:

42.

By the way, parcels up to 50 kg pass through this center. Heavier items are processed elsewhere.

By the way, in terms of installing equipment in Russia, in a sense, there is a big bonus.

The bonus is that we have nothing! :) This means that we are now installing the newest equipment possible!

Things like this were introduced here:
-Automated sorting of all types of mail
-In-line method of mail processing without warehousing
-Electronic data exchange with postal operators
-Refusal of paper forms and simplification of processing technologies

And by mid-2015, Russian Post plans to transfer such centers to 100% electronic document flow. Including with regard to interaction with the Customs Service. You understand that it is not so easy to come to an agreement with such a government agency as Customs...

But it is worth noting that what we were shown is only the first milestone, even in this location not far from Vnukovo airport.

By 2022, the mail processing center will be expanded and automated even more. And not only international, but also domestic Russian shipments will be processed here. And then the volume of processed mail will reach almost 22,000,000 (millions!) units per month!

If you have any questions - ask! Employees of the Russian Post promised to answer any of the most tricky and incredible questions regarding this center and the processing of international shipments.

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