AirTags Expose Dodgy Postal Industry (DHL Responds)
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- Опубліковано 2 тра 2024
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AirTagAlex's Video: • Sending an Apple Airta...
TheTravellingAirTags Video: • Sending an AirTag to N...
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
1:20 - Update on AirTags
2:12 - DHL make first contact
4:17 - Q&A with DHL
10:28 - Tour of DHL facility
22:42 - UA-camrs sending AirTags to North Korea
24:09 - Investigating Royal Mail and PostNL
26:09 - Conversation with Royal Mail and PostNL
30:05 - Sending 3 AirTags to North Korea via Royal Mail
31:14 - Parcel and Post Expo & Universal Postal Union
36:00 - Parcel Sorting Simulation
39:01 - Final thoughts
40:42 - Response from DHL
Research:
SNBC Article: www.snbc.com.cn/news/577.html
IPC Article on Royal Mail Automation: bit.ly/3YrKxLL
PostNL Sorting Center: • PostNL The Hague ES
Royal Mail Sorting Center: • Behind the scenes at C...
Royal Mail Parcel Volumes: www.statista.com/statistics/1...
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Instagram: / mega.lag
Twitter: / megalagofficial - Наука та технологія
Latest updates on the Royal Mail AirTag can be seen here: twitter.com/megalagofficial
A little self promotion… though you deserve it.
North Korea is a weird place
I'm surprised that they only use 2 digits when they have the IATA codes (Airport code e.g TYO for Tokyo, SYD for Sydney) much better system. considering there are over 240 countries and territories on this mud ball.
It's sad that you have to derail the video multiple times by "muh global warming"
Thanks for your efforts, at this point it's safe to say I'll never send via them and avoid any company that uses their services.
This is 100% how companies should respond to criticism
I feel they ought to have disclosed how many parcels they lose a day. It's not right for them to accept your parcel without producing the potential risks
Then, if that does not work sue the jerk.
Unfortunately, not all companies want to even bother. with this, we can only apologize.
A little less evasion would be preferable
They mostly just said "Yes we have issues but shareholders wouldn't want us to spend money to fix them". Corporate greed strikes again.
To anyone saying DHL was “bribing” him: I’m from Germany and Tours like this are very common. Throughout my whole school life I’ve visited a whole amount of companies like DHL. I learned how Newspaper was made, how Glue and tape was made, how chemicals get filled into cans, printing companies and even things like video production and prop making… it is a learning experience and very educational to see how things work. So it’s not surprising to see DHL Germany inviting him.
It is interesting because, at least to me (with my American mindset), it sounds like the companies are almost grooming (not necessarily in a bad way) kids to work for them later in life. But either way, it is great to see how the world around us works, and surely I would have LOVED tours like that as a kid.
@DarkSwordsman they are grooming future industry professionals, and that's a good thing!
I can only agree to this. In 12th grade (gymnasium, public school, with a emphasis on IT) we travelled for a whole week to different companies. Some of those were smaller middle-class companies, but we also got a tour at SAP including their server rooms and another on at Oracle (both one of the largest software companies). It was great for both sides as we could learn about possible future employers and actually seeing the stuff we learn in school and for them it's great as advertisement and possibly gaining future employees.
@@DarkSwordsman Honestly I kinda wish the US did the same. America has such a bad consumerism and wastefulness problem PRECISELY because people have NO idea how their products are even made. It's easy to be apathetic when you have no awareness of the complex processes that go behind even something as simple as a chocolate bar. People just consume mindlessly since products are a commodity. Being aware of the processes that go behind scenes makes you more mindful and respectful of your products. How many americans have actually seen cows die for the burgers they enjoy eating so much? I'm not trying to convert anyone to veganism, but I really think that's something important that people should be more aware. A living creature died for your convenience, at least be respectful.
@@DarkSwordsmanI’m Canadian and when I was in grade like 5 we went to whole foods to learn how sausage was made lol
For a major international company to take a relatively small youtuber on a tour , answering questions and do all this is pretty cool tbh. Much respect for that.
Well, to be fair he kinda ruined their image with that video, and since they probably did not want a scandal, they chose that resolution over a lawsuit.
@@mr.cauliflower3536 No clue but a Lot of opinion, ITS normal to Go to places Like dhl and Look how the stuff works(after you asked of course), in German schools they have preplanned Trips Like this, multiple Times a year. So yeah, your right they dont want a Skandal, when U dont even know a Thing about German culture.....
@@mr.cauliflower3536 DHL is a pretty big company, doing a lot more than just handling parcel. I'm sure they'll survive :D
The Postal industry doesn't have any dark secrets to hide besides some operational inefficiencies that only matter to Green nuts, why would they care about letting someone walk around with a Camera?
Honestly, their response email was exemplary. They addressed how they messed up, they apologized for messing up, and they said how they were going to change to avoid messing up in the future. Every company should be like that.
...except the response was wrong, and required a great deal of followup to correct. Miss that part of the video?
Big companies use UA-cam for advertising, stands to reason that they may want to do some damage control when they know a lot of ppl watch UA-cam.. they would've seen how many ppl have watched this video and would want to get ahead of any issues.
In this case they were "gracious" about it, kudos really only for that. But based on My own experience of using them, I will never use them again, preferring to fly the parcel over myself.
not really was very boilerplate with the infamous we are sorry you feel bad
All emails he got, from every company, were VERY cookie cutter corporate speak 😂. It’s hilarious that you fell for it and thought “WOW, they really do personally care about him” like they’re somehow personal friends now or something. Billions of “we’re sorry we didn’t meet your expectations and we will strive to be better” are sent every single day in every single industry on earth dude…😂
I'm seeing a bunch of replies saying it was too dishonest, too impersonal, too corporate to be good. I encourage you all to write letters of complaint to as many corporations as you can and see how many of them don't respond with a copypasted form letter that could literally be about anything. See how many actually admit wrongdoing, and of those, how many actually address the specific problem you wrote them about. You'll find that number approaches zero. Whether or not the verbage is too business-like is beside the point, the remarkable thing here is that they actually restated what they did wrong, admitted that it was their mistake, and gave concrete details on how they planned to improve, plans that they can be held to in the future. An actual corporate boilerplate response would be completely non-specific and never mention any happenings past, present, or future. This wasn't that, this was a response that decision makers at the company clearly put thought into.
This madlad got a guided tour from DHL and studied enough things to become something close to a postal service expert just from doing a fun experiment with a couple of airtags. Huge respect.
"and studied enough things to be a postal expert"....lol. No. Expertise is not acquired in this fashion. You folks are not oppressed by mail services of the world. The clickbait capitalism of UA-cam dependent income: "This isn't perfect, so it sucks!" The Cynicism of the Spoiled.
@@TheBaxes your English was perfect.
@@CameronHemeon Thanks! It seems like the other guy's comment was deleted so I'm just going to delete that answer now that it no longer has context
Far from an expert. Not to denigrate the guy, but there's quite a bit lacking from his video. The simulated estimates of mistaken packages is pure speculation that really doesn't belong in any serious analysis. It's also wrong to assume that processing mistakes will typically end up in a parcel being sent to Australia instead of neighboring Austria. Even in those cases, it isn't like the parcel is being sent buckled up in a single-seat jet. It's one or two or three parcels among hundreds being posted. That vastly reduces the environmental impact of the error. The plane is still going to fly with or without that parcel. It's likely that the environmental impact of what he's highlighting isn't even in the top ten items these companies need to focus on.
Another important point that went totally unmentioned is the high percentage of unionized labor among parcel carriers. Unions typically resist automation. I wouldn't be surprised if the economics of automation have to account for labor contract costs that sustain inefficiency.
The video was entertaining and I applaud his efforts and what he was able to learn, but it's an alarmist presentation that detracts from his work.
@@grantcivyt I agree with you on the relatively low ecological impact of a missort, although if 10% are missorted it means at least 10% of the space in that plane carries volume it should not, which has to be corrected by sending it again. Typically these items are not very heavy and it's more of a space consideration, which is why I agree the impact is probably low.
Where I disagree is about Austria and Australia being neighbouring :-)
This is the kind of investigative journalism our media outlets have completely abandoned
Completely agree
I think its rather that companies have abandoned real cooperation
What foolishness, a video littered with looping clips and wrapping up with an empty conclusion is hardly Pulitzer level journalism, of which there is plenty to consume and be largely informed. Of course that involves reading for minutes at a time and so here we are: mistaking pablum for reporting.
@@TonyGonzales The point is the investigative nature of this. If you really think the media is doing a good job of this currently, you might want to broaden your horizons a bit.
Too much work, easier to take something someone else wrote, re-write that and call it their own, it's not plagiarism it's reality.
To answer a couple of things about Royal Mail in particular: at least as of 2016, automatic sorting was ONLY in place for domestic letter mailings, and parcels were sorted manually. This was always explained as being due to the variable size and weight of parcels making them difficult to accurately 'face' (i.e., turn the right way round) for machine reading.
As for why they keep claiming security reasons: RM's entire operation is covered by the Official Secrets Act in the UK. In theory, I think this is supposed to be to prevent employees leaking information from others' letters, but in practice they use it to be intensely opaque to scrutiny.
(Citation for both of these: I worked for RM briefly in 2016, and had to sign the OSA to work there.)
Regarding reading. You can make a glass box that covers majority of the spots that it could be scanned. If it failed to read it then can be routed to the manual routing
@@stop7556 Or you could manually align the parcels. Parcels that failed to read automatically get scanned manually. Not with manual inputs, but with a hand scanner.
Working for the Post Office I did discover royal mail seems to be awful at stopping drugs being posted. We reported multiple parcels from one repeat customer (claimed gym supplements, didnt smell like gym supplements...) we also told the police and our collecting postie who passed it along. Never got stopped, only had one berate drug buyer calling us up as his special delivery (daughters bday present 🤔) was four hours late. Multiple times we tried to grab the address of the drug sender. Post office and royal mail advised to just continue service.
Facing issues have been solved for YEARS already. 360 degree laser scanners….top bottom and all sides…zero barcodes are missed.
I have to interact with large corporations sometimes and typically when somebody says "we can't share numbers" it often just means "we don't have the numbers"
Having worked at a factory, I could totally understand how missing North vs South Korea could happen, especially when one destination is WAYYY more common, but it’s cool you were able to go and see what it’s like on the floor!
@@issadraco532 yup you'd think a company originating from a country that was divided for decades like Korea wouldn't make that mistake to begin with
I guess Austria and Australia is way more common, also considering half of 9gag users are German.
@@issadraco532 officially one is called Democratic Republic of Korea and South is called Republic of Korea.
technically, if you send something there, you are from there, and then it can be really difficult for others to decipher. Like most people won't really know the difference between chinese, japanese or korean letters (it's the circles above things). And I totally get why someone wouldn't care if it's paid so low wage. And the customers aren't better either, they do mistakes too.
@@thaibreuer3533 sure customers might do mistakes but there is no Sydney, Melbourne, or Perth in Austria, or is there?
asides from international cargo shipments
work by country codes like AU for Australia and AT for Austria or KP vs KR not to mention all the technology utilized with barcodes, square codes, and whatnot
I used an AirTag to help United airlines track down my own bag that was stuck somewhere near the tarmac in another city. Such an easy way to detect/call companies on their BS
And then you have the airline that bans AirTags in luggage because they got tired of dealing with people knowing they're lying
@@mitchellcrazyeye Wait which airline is this? Or is this just a hypothetical?
@@mitchellcrazyeye what airlines have ban them? Lufthansa tried and walked it back
@@Entr0py404 I wasn't aware Lufthansa walked back on this, I'll leave my comment up regardless as a hypothetical - another airline will end up doing it.
@@yaycupcake Read above comment :)
I use to work for Amazon distribution in America and we did mail including for USPS, UPS, and FedEx. Everything that came into the building was scanned by the Induct crew who also printed a sortation label to it. Then sortation crew would scan it and then scan the bag it belongs to(and put it in that bag.) Then the bags got scanned to a load, the loads were scanned to a van, finally the driver would scan each package from the bag when delivering. Each time would be yet another time any error could be discovered and fixed, often finding packages that were sent to our building by mistake by induct, the PS(problem solve) team tracking errors by sorters, and even delivery drivers finding lost packages that were just tossed in a random bag by a lazy worker. Lots of manual handling, but those things got scanned at least like four times just at our building. A mishandling rate of 0.004% was our target range, though we often sat at a much higher 0.008% due to constant bad workers and the revolving door hiring to just keep enough staff available.
This sounds like a sorting system designed by some computer networks engineers 😎 unlike what's seen in this video...
And yet they managed to deliver a book I ordered to the house across the street, which I only recovered because they confidently sent a picture to me of it sitting in front of entirely the wrong address
its important to keep in mind that automatic sorting companies will give you higher numbers for failure rate of manual sorting since they want to sell automatic sorters
True... but it is also the only number available, and since postal companies hide their internal figures its what we have to believe without contrary data.
As part of working in IT consulting I spent a couple of years on a project at DHL in Bonn. Very good company to work with and the atmosphere was pretty laid back overall. One thing that I found particularly interesting was that during the period around Christmas, employees from various parts the company would volunteer at packet sorting centers to help with the high demand. This included higher ups like project managers.
I wonder why they haven't utilized AI or anything to help automate the sorting process I know here in NZ we use large machines that auto sort to each region. Upscalling using more advanced tech could be expensive at first but it would be very efficant and would be less likely to make a mistake.
@@kiwiboysl They are part of The Resistance.
I had an issue with a delivery but after explaining why we needed our order fast DHL gave us free express shipping.
From Germany to my front door in Sweden, Blekinge in almost exactly 4 hours.
They won some loyalty from us that day.
@@kiwiboysl They definitely use machines and automatic sorting, but sometimes things happen, and so they require people on the floor, to keep machines going, sort parcels that couldn't be sorted by the machines.
Exactly what I would expect. Let's all help pulling this stone up the stairs instead of using wheels.
I moved to the UK and I have to say that the UK seem to use the "security" response as an excuse for anything that they arent comfortable talking about
Or "fire hazard" when they're too lazy to do something.
I absolutely agree with you! When I lived in the UK this was a standard response!
I was trying to return some clothing recently, but I didn't have the card used to purchase it. The manager told me that a refund to the original card wasn't possible without having the card due to fraud and data protection reasons. Doesn't make sense to me.
@@userPrehistoricman a fair amount of bullshit artistry of this kind in my country unfortunately. “Sorry, I don’t make the rules” is the same type of thing - defer to a higher authority, real or fictional, and you don’t have to bother.
Not all of it of course, but so much “it’s for security” “it’s data protection” “it’s for safety”. etc. stuff is just bullshit artistry. Never thought of it as being a UK thing until now
@@lordgemini2376 oh grow up, persecution complexes are very unbecoming
This makes DHL look really good. They have shown professionalism and not jumped to drastic decisions like other companies would. Good job on DHL
On the other hand, I work with one of their major global competitors and looking how their ops are run compared to ours, their look to be 20 years behind us.
Kudos for the transparency though, I don't think my company would decide to go so far this way. We're way ahead them in tracking and automation, but we have our own skeletons in the closet too.
Hats off to DHL for treating a customer like this. As a German, I've never experienced such openness from them. Rather felt like I'm a nuisance to them, than a customer with a legitimate request.
Oh and man, your content is interesting af 👍 guess I have a couple videos to watch.
Thanks! I'm glad you're enjoying my content :)
try creating multiple videos receiving millions of views about DHL, then wait a couple years, and you too might receive customer support!
@@maxb2000 This actually seems like the easier route than using the contact form haha
@@maxb2000 A trick I use is creating a dormant company in your respective country, then instead of going through consumer customer service you can use their commercial customer services. You can also make claims like the documents in the letter are of extreme importance to the company etc and they are a lot more apologetic, in my experience anyway.
Not related to mail but I once did the same process for a hard-drive that failed and Seagate offered to replace the hard drive and pay the €5,000 euros or something for forensic analysis of the hard drive! I didn’t take them up on the offer since I was worried they would quickly realise my hard drive was just filled with old school work and video games hahaha.
Worked at UPS for a few years doing the jobs you showed. It was an eye-opener.
Tips for successful shipments.
Printed labels or very neat large block print with a waterproof marker. Although pre-prints and bar codes are taking over as are automated systems, your sorter will do a better job if they can spot the zip and state of your package more easily.
Use shipping envelopes and standardized boxes. Weird shapes or small packages will often get lost in the system.
Pack it good enough that you can stand on it without damaging the box. A worker might step on it, or when loaded in a truck, it might end up at the bottom of a 10ft tall stack of boxes.
It probably will also get thrown on a conveyor belt, no matter what it is. When I say throw, I mean throw.
Also insides should be protected enough so that if you throw them in to the wall they wouldnt get damaged.
I was told that by employee of slovenian post
@Oliver when you are sorting, we are talking UPS in 1990, there were 3 belts in front of you and 9 behind you in a T shape. We often threw the boxes, but if you did it right, they landed softly. This is where the proper packing and standardized boxes came in to keep the object from bouncing around inside. We moved fast. As a general rule they regularly enforced you weren't allowed to throw boxes.
Unloaders were expected to do 1000 per hour. A good sorter could keep up most of the time at that pace. A fast unloader could do 1200-1500. If it was a truck of uniform small boxes, like textbooks, they could do 2000-5000. That's when they'd put a second unloader in all and pull the stop bars out and let the truck unload goto the entire section. Roughly 10 sorters. They'd still overwhelm us. The boxes were definitely treated like Frisbees at times like these.
@@Gouretoratto I used to work for a delivery company of items ordered online; their motto of warehouse staff was... If it says Fragile, throw it harder.
As shipper I have spoken to couriers that had record days of 300 stops in one day. In the parcel business you will handle a few thousand parcels weekly. Anyone that doesn't throw boxes after a few days/hours on the job is not human.
Modern journalism is a beautiful thing when done right. Thank you for making shipping interesting.
Thank you for watching!
@@MegaLag Hi. I think that you have missed some details here.
1. There are still a lot of handwritten addresses on mail. Most OCR systems are still struggling with it, humans do much better, that is one of the reasons not to use a machine.
2. You are multiplying the error rate through every time it's redirected, or "sorted". In my opinion you should be actually reducing it. With these rates and additional sorting points, there is a good chance of spotting a mistake and correcting it.
Not the other way round. Machine is more likely to repeat the mistake, especially if it's the same type of the machine, different human is most likely to fix it.
I'm not saying that's the main reason why they use humans, but that your math might be wrong here.
There was a good video by @tomscott on the postal address recognition department for USPS.
All humans, checking after struggling OCR machines.
Please correct me if I got it wrong!
Hope that helps!
@@ataritheone Hey thanks for watching!
OCR is actually really good at reading handwriting. This is also evident in Tom Scotts video where USPS claim 99% of all mail is automated with the remote coding station handling the last 1%. OCR has gotten so good that they’ve shut down most of their remote coding centers and just have that last one Tom visited ;)
If multiple sorts happened in one facility, sure that would reduce the number of errors. However, the second and third sorts take place at different facilities. By the time a misrouted parcel has reached the wrong country or sorting facility, the damage is already done. It’s already travelled more than it should have. Additionally, that parcel will most likely go back to the original sorting centre where the initial mistake took happened in the first place. It’s entirely possible for it to experience the same missort a second or third time. They call this “looping parcels” or “parcels on loop”. It’s a serious issue which I’ll be covering in a follow up video. Hope that answers your questions :)
Made right? He fails in gathering information. Just google "Sorting in IPZ Frankfurt" and you will learn that he literally missed that they use Automatic sorting for most of their parcels. What he showed was the manual stations for parcels with bad labels, missing labels or other errors... 450k parcels each day go through the IPZ, most during the 8h nightshift. so 21 stations is far to little to sort all of that manually.
@@MegaLag OCR is 'struggling' with printed text (when I scan my bills into the banking app (3 entries each) it inputs incorrect data for more than 1 bill per 100 scanned, and at times taking minutes to successfully scan all 3 entries), and fails catastrophically for hand-writing more often than not (at least if we include calligraphy and doctor's handwriting).
Having worked in DHL and also the Aviation industry and with a small dab in Fintech - it's really hard to make upgrades to a system which can not have downtime - there is not enough storage space in any of the sorting centers for even 1 days worth of goods. In addition if there is a system breakdown then the volume is too big to clear and sort all the stuff manually, with a pen and paper. So we are stuck with MS-DOS looking crap, which never fails. The thing I did come to appreciate about the MS-DOS looking carp. Also it was lightning fast. Every input has an immediate reaction, no loading time, no waiting after the computer.
I work in distribution and our systems absolutely need down time for programming fixes. We are missing about 1000 shipments every day, partly because our entire operation runs on 3 different programs, one of which we were told up front would not communicate with the 45 year old program I have to use every day. This means order information is not correctly relayed to our distribution center. That means the product is not picked off the shelf and sent to packaging, because they're not getting the information. And our shipping department's program is just completely broken. Packages just... Sit there.
And all of this doesn't include the problems our system has at the order stage. Product numbers have to be entered into the system exactly. And if there are multiple supplier options (mostly because only a partial product number was entered), the system relies on manual correction.
Then there's incorrect stock counts. We are supposed to be displaying current stock in real time. So... how do we feel when our website says we have 5000 of a product in stock but our order system says we have 0, and the customer sends a screenshot of our website? We look stupid.
And all of this is dependent on the order system actually functioning. On a daily basis, I have to force the program to close because it froze and won't respond, and we waste HOURS every day, just waiting on it to load the next screen. We have fixes for these things, but upper management refuses to let our IT team implement them. We are all frustrated, pissed off, and ready to rage quit.
At some point the solution becomes "build a parallel system, then swap over once it can handle the load." It's not ideal or easy, but at some point it's going to have to happen anyway.
Failing that, you can just wait for disaster to strike and rebuild with new technology.
Simple: pause accepting all packages for 1 day. Or at least reroute/detour the packages. Same idea of how any highway road gets rebuilt. Close some lanes, or close the road entirely and detour all traffic.
Also, it will take a while until a major upgrade to the system will run at capacity again. Staff must learn the new system. There will likely be unexpected problems with the new system causing errors or delays. There’s also the cost of the new equipment. And then the potential gain of the upgrade is likely way overblown by the companies selling the automated solutions.
DHL has likely run the calculation and possibly done many experiments to figure it’s not worth the investment.
I like how this series started off as a test for air tags, and now it has turned into exposing the mailing industries
Holy shit. You went from sending playful air tag parcels to being a pro researcher about the postal world. Respect.
Its so absurd that you fill in delivery addresses through online forms with street address validation systems (correlated via zip codes), print out standarized labels with qr codes and bar codes eveywhere, all for your package to end up going through a single, highly distressed human point of failure...
No wonder my DHL packages always seem to end up going random places before they finally make it home.
From a last leg delivery perspective a big part of the issue is that paper labels are pretty fragile compared to the package they're attached to. Hell, a wrinkled bit of tape over a label can render barcodes and qr codes unscannable. Add to that the fact that validation systems aren't necessarily accurate and depend on the database being used. I've seen packages going to the right street and address but addressed to the wrong city/town because national postal databases and the courier database disagree on the border between municipalites which I'd imagine to apply to intl databases for foreign countries as well.
Obviously anecdotal but I'd say that in my time working in the industry label errors/inaccuracy beat the human error rate. Granted that's more at the level of local delivery but would only be amplified at national level sorting facilities
That's the problem, neither barcode nor QR codes are actually standardized. Well, at least not standardized enough across the whole world. And in an industry as large as this, when you upgrade one facility, you'll have to upgrade everything or at least make it somehow compatible with the rest of the company operations. There are postal services that use fully automatized sorting (with a small group of people handling hard to read labels), but it will take time to be an industry standard and it's much easier to upgrade within one country than to convince the whole world to use one common system.
@@mrkv4k Absolutely, also even most postal services with automated sorting are standardized to certain formats of mail, or automated to the level of letter mail only. packages and bubble mailers or boxes are all going to add a layer of complexity and handling complication. mail is generally flat-ish and can be manipulated pretty conveniently odd shapes and materials would make even orienting the package so it could be read more difficult.
@@fezik8870 It could be done very easily, but they would have to standardize the label location. And that's the crazy part. Convincing the rest of the world to do anything is almost impossible.
I used to work in logistics, and there's one major issue with the manual sorting that would need to be resolved.
If you allow people to write out addresses, then you would need text recognition software to sort it, and then there are still edge cases that will require human verification. This is expensive and would only marginally decrease errors.
The better but more annoying solution is to do something like UPS does, and require that the sender enter in the information into a website, print off a label with a generated qr/barcode, and then have the system just read the destination code and automate it that way.
To actually implement this is the real issue, and would probably require some kind of dagen H type of changeover.
Posten in Norway also allows people to order and print their own shipping label which is really neat, but as you said, implementing it is an issue. Not everyone has a computer (mainly thinking of elderly people), and not everyone has a printer at home (though they should be able to use a printing service to get it done, but it probably adds up to an unnecessary amount of steps just to obtain a shipping label).
The way to handle the machine readable limitation is to generate a certainty value on reading - if the reading is below the required certainty value (such as because it's handwritten) then the item can be sorted to the hand reading stream.
This is literally the normal system used by most postal services including DHL- MegaLag just suffered a case of severe "lets not simply google the IPZs tech and learn that they use fully automated sorting for 90% of their parcels"
in short his entire point is based on just wanting to not see the automated sections/manual correctionsections of the hubs he showed.
This is pure gold! Thank you for all the work you've done following up on this!
Man they saw a potential PR disaster and handled it so well
I dont see where this should be a PR disaster?... They just dont ship to North Korea... Like everyone else....
This is a 45 minute video of free PR for DHL! Regardless of fault, this was a great move on their part.
Their PR response wordings are top class. Gold standard
@@lasdiLP it's not the part of why they don't send to NK, it's about why it's lost in transit and why china post didn't contact them about not sending to NK and toss them to SK, also about why they are lying about the package missing.
I've got to say, UPS is one of the leaders in automation technology. They work harder in their small hubs to reduce misloads dramatically, than any other company. I've seen it go from peeling stickers and writing numbers in crayon. To full RFID detection of misloaded boxes/parcels. I can say that one of the biggest hurdles for change is the management levels. In the hubs you have at least 5 different levels of management. I cannot begin to imagine at the corporate level how many management levels there are. Imagine a request from mid or upper management at a hub to get to the person it needs to get to at the corporate level for approval. Then there's the union. Any changes to automation must be in line with the current union rules. So many hurdles to jump for any reasonable change to take place.
I suspect the widespread unionization of the industry globally is the primary reason for that no player in the industry wants to talk about why they're not more automated. The honest answer would threaten peace with their union.
@@PrezVeto They'd be glad to fire every single postal worker. Unfortunately, they actually need people to do this work. They do their best to understaff, speed up the lines, and actually wreck expensive sorting machines, while eliminating local sorting centers. (See Louis DeJoy). The postal union in the US is all that is standing between you and a privatized, more expensive, and not any more efficient USPS.
I'm proud of what my team is able to do automation wise. Idk how things work with implementation as I'm just on the software side though.
I worked in this area around 10 years ago, at this one depot the rate of missorts for manual sorting was roughly 0.1%, we trailed an automated device but it worked slower, it couldn't just rapidly sling parcels around like the workers were supposed to do.
Any idea how many parcels 0.1% works out to?
On average between 1 and 10 for each shift, if I remember correctly under 5 was deemed acceptable. At one point we had depot cages in alphabetical order and had a few Warrington items sent to Waterloo which had to be driven back to Warrington at a large loss.
Yeah I reckon that was the thing, technology is probably better nowadays, but these big companies probably don't have a huge need to invest billions into new tech and organisational changes for a margial, if any, improvement in sorting error rates. All based on some nonsense parcels to North Korea of all places, it's really a non-issue in their regular life.
I used to work at FedEx, and while our smaller parcels were sorted manually, each person loading the parcels onto a truck had a barcode scanner that was mounted to your wrist, and if the package was at the wrong truck, we could just throw it back onto the conveyor belt and eventually get sorted again. We also had an efficiency rating based on how many packages we had scanned, which encouraged us to actually take the time to scan things instead of just throw them in the truck.
So you get a bag of packages and scan them manually again? That doesn’t sound very efficient.
that assumes it was ingested correctly. If, as the video points out, a package is tagged to go to Australia instead of Austria at the ingest point... all further systems downstream will assume this package needs to go to Australia. Ironically, if it then DOES somehow go onto the Austria truck, when the truck loader scans the parcel it will be marked is incorrect and sent back to be sorted again!
Same at DHL. I actually wonder why they don't scan at the international business. At every sorting center in Germany they are scanning every parcel. The only thing I could imagine is that it is expensive to get a sorter that is able to deal with all of the different postal formats.
@@niklaslicher8 the manual process here is the ingest, not the sorting. The sorting is already done automatically using the flip trays. What's mind-numbing is why are they using a manual process for ingest, when DHL actually issues the shipping label themselves and it has a barcode/QR code with the full shipping addresses and tracking codes encoded.... it really isn't that expensive to get a conveyer-mounted high speed QR code reader to read those labels as they are placed on the ingest belt.
I suspect there's more to the story. Knowing Germany this is a workers' rights/union issue that we're seeing, not really a technology problem or business decision.
@@andreacoppini After watching a second time, you are right. The thing is the sorting mechanism is the most expensive thing. A scanner shouldn't be that expensive, especially if you calculate the economical damages of shipping wrong and especially paying those workers high german wages.
I worked for DHL for 9 years and am very proud of how they responded to you. Having been in the industry I can attest that you chose one of the most difficult countries to get a parcel into and is an unfair test of services, but a good test of their customer service response handling.
Agreed - it’s obvious to see why North Korea is a problematic destination no matter what. It’s not a great comparison for the average shipment, but it’s genius in highlighting the major inefficiencies all around.
I would bet money that the percentage of lost shipments are significantly higher than we think. Almost everyone has experienced it, just consider the number of packages you’ve personally sent or received, and the percentage of packages that have had issues- it’s a gamble. But it’s not as big if a deal for the consumer, at least surface level, because most of of time you can get a refund.
The money these companies could save, though, which would eventually get passed onto the consumer… my god. Not to mention, the emission savings…
That was kind of the point though, they were offering it as a destination when sent but then (some) stopped offering it once it was brought to their attention packages were not reaching the country, which is something they could have monitored internally a bit better in reality.
@@davearel having worked at a small webstore that used DHL but wasn't big enough to do commercial shipments, I'd guess that normal shipments have a 1-2% rate (ish, depends on the country and all that jazz) of getting lost. Since the stuff we sold was custom made and quite a pain in the ass to remake we kept a close eye on the track and trace of all the packages we sent out.
Only one package was ever actually really lost though, my former boss is quite scary on the phone and that got them to do another search every time lmfao
That one time it WAS lost was because of some sort of accident involving the delivery truck? Idk, don't remember exactly
You comment is alright besides the "unfair test of service" BS. If you offered North Korea as a destination, then you take full accountability and responsibility like any destination. This is basic principle and morals. Educate yourself
@@grapefruitsyrup8185 A better test of service would have been to send to multiple destinations, not a single destination. Maybe you should read up on proper testing.
I'm so glad you made a video on this! I've been so frustrated with the postal industry for years and I'm glad I'm also gettings answers too!
One thing to consider, all packages and letters are most likely to be sorted multiple times depending on how many stops they have on their travel.
This will lower the over all error rate considering final delivery.
Ehhh, actually it would increase the error rate in terms of wastage, which (weirdly?) seemed to be his primary complaint. But yeah, final delivery SHOULD be reliable. Just raises the question of if that's actually true.
It could easily make it worse, it depends how their hubs are set up.
Don't work in the sorting industry, but I did work security at a UK-based DHL sorting plant for a while. 8% is way overstated, the target on site was 0.5% and daily sorting errors rarely went above that. However, that was only 1 step in the parcel's journey, maybe the 8% figure includes the entire journey of a parcel, and that would also explain why you got very different answers.
No the actual reality is that humans are way better than machines at just the reading part and moreso in many many other parts and the errors maay be lower aswel as the unknown number of corections they almost certainly make many times a day
@@insiainutorrt259 Used to be true like 10 years ago but not anymore. Remember, they stopped using text Captchas and moved to using image Captchas instead because the computers got too good at reading text to the point where computers could solve text Captchas that humans couldn't even figure out.
@@TheElitedeath and Google used to use captchas to help train models to read house numbers off homes mailboxes from street view imagery. Then they switched to object detection, presumably because the OCR was considered good enough. If there was any further training required, they would use the free labor for certain.
8% was from sorting mashine developer, so you know their statements dont hold any water.
Even 0,5% i think is high number, since i worked as a sorter and it is not that hard to do the job correctly...
@@insiainutorrt259 punctuation, do u use it?
Kudos to DHL Germany for being so open and friendly - most companies (if not all) would just dismiss a UA-cam journalist. And praise to you for not just letting it go. Well done.
UA-cam journalists have much more reach than normal ones these days. 11 million people looking at a single bad review can hurt a business, even one as big as DHL or Amazon.
The amount of dedication and effort you put into these videos is incredible! Keep up the good work 👍
For some reason, the algo fed me this video and it's the most unexpectedly fascinating concept i've seen in a long time. Great job. Subscribed.
THIS is how an incredible PR department handles something like this. Many companies could learn from this.
DHL is a TERRIBLE company that treats it's customers and employees like shit. 20 million people saw his video, no shit they will put a couple HOURS into trying to lessen the fallout. If you look at advertising costs compared to the cost of giving him a little tour, knowing how many people will sit through the hour video he is making about it. They are getting a freaking BARGAIN and a half. Almost 1 million views already. How much would it cost to show 1 million people a 40 minute ad?
Yeah, it was a good move to let him in, but they still show bad behaviour, their written responses are just marketing BS. "Investment are not worth it" - so ultimately, despite all their words about innovation and making sure accuracy is high, ultimately, they don't care about their customers. I'm sure that even if not full automatic, but at least some double checking system would improve accuracy by orders of magnitude, like a AI powered camera near operator that would also try to recognize address and if it's decision wasn't same as human it could show some warning for the operator to check closely. And it wouldn't cost much at all, especially comparing to their other expenses and profits.
@@antonminyailo5976 They keep apologizing for everything, so I can rob a bank and say to the police: my apologies for doing this?
@@TheZwerfer14 The thing that they got right that other companies don't is that they admit that the screw up was on their hand. Most other companies will fight the claim in court until the dust settles and no one care on the issue anymore.
They really didnt have to do any of this
AirTag and this guy are the worst things that happened to postal industry lately. Or the best if they react accordingly.
Mind a bit blown by your dedication to this topic and how much time/effort/finance you have spent researching and bringing this problem to light. Mad respect
🤑🤑🤑
I wouldn't be surprised if a company/industry put Jono on a list or something lol, I bet somebody wants him silenced 🤐
I wonder how many views he needs just to break even.
@@Vyker Watch the later half of this video. He has drank the Brilliant sponsorship koolaid, he'll be fine. 😆
Worst? No, on the contrary, this is for the better. It pushes them to fix broken stuff.
I feel like your channel popped out of nowhere (I know it didn’t and I don’t mean to devalue your previous uploads) but all of a sudden you release some of the best videos, not just topic but editing too. Keep it up! (But also love the mail saga that’s unfolding)
Thanks Ben! Glad you're enjoying the content :)
The way they handled this whole affair makes me have a great deal of respect for DHL. I know they only handled it this well because of the public attention, but that alone means they actually put some effort into looking over the whole affair.
Honestly mad respect to DHL. This was extremely professional
yup bribing the guy who exposed your shit, absolutely professional!
@@heateslier Bribing? Where is the bribing? Are you just making s*** up?
@@incognitofelon sure I can explain it to you, but you have to come over here, of course I'll pay for your flight cost and lodging (first class, 5 stars) and after I can give you a nice factory tour, if that's ok with ya
@@heateslier Tell me you did not watch the video without telling me you did not watch the video.
Still a shitty company because of these workers who manually sort parcels by destination
As somebody who works in the shipping industry, this has made me so glad that my job isn't like this
I Worked at UPS as a 𝙨𝙢𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙨𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙚𝙧. It was important to get training for this job. I was trained on a computer system with mock mail to sort
After graduating (had to pass with a specific amount of errors) and being able to do the job was hellish. I started there part time and they made you cram 8hrs into 4hrs.
I didn't have as many conveyor belts after I sorted but we had co-workers and the end of the sliding chute and they bagged it and tagged with a plastic tie (like the square one on bread)
After they lifted the bag on the exiting belt to loading they decide what to do based on the number on the mail tag. Hence truck to local towns, state etc.
Tell you what definitely a reason why I stopped working there. The insane amount of pressure for accuracy and efficiency (is speed). NLG I hated the supervisor yelling day in and day out
Really enjoyed this. I worked in mail services for nine years (a long time ago) and found your investigations fascinating. Thanks loads!
Thanks for watching!
To your question why DHL sort manually, AFAIK they wanted to go fully automated some years ago and said they tested it and the machines were about 1 second slower per package than the people. It's a similar thing to ALDI etc. cashiers being faster than machines.
Obviously that's most likely regarding packages from people, who usually write the address by hand while DHL industry services are different and probably handled mostly by machines.
From personal knowledge I can say that the machines transporting the packages to the sorting etc. often jam if there are too many packages or differing sizes which then has to be sorted out by people and takes a lot of time and nerves. So automation is probably saving a lot less time than you might think, even if OCR would be able to read every hand-written address etc. perfectly.
You went out and did a whole professional audit on the postal service industry. This is essentially a case study. Great work. I hope some companies are listening.
As a programmer that works with machinery, I can understand why some companies are like "If it ain't broke don't fix it". But that giant companies aren't even considering moving to a more automated process is mind-boggling.
Great videos!
Or like just use the a bar scanner...? Machinery to correctly handle packages would be expensive but even a supermarket has a bar code scanner.
Especially not when there is minimal downside to the errors
there are some barriers that prevent an automation process, the first one is the legal barrier (there are some laws that prevents the automation of some processes) and the second one and imo the biggest one is that the shape of the envelopes/boxes is not standarized and cannot be standarized, i'm saying this cuz the technology to identify text/images is already out there but the issue is how can we manipulate and repositionate the parcels in a way that a computer with some type of camera could read the code/country or whatever needs to be readed to sort the parcels, sure we can have humans doing this manually and a pc reading the code using a qr reader or a bar scanner but with the ammount of parcels/packages that needs to be readed per second there will be issues cuz the durability of a camera will never be superior to the durability of a human eye and like i said, the legal part there is in a gray area
Bruh it's obscene, I know for a fact it wouldn't take too much effort to incorporate the destination code into the shipping barcode or an additional perhaps QR code. Like whyyy do it that way?
@@FarerynielIthilwen Money
This is absolute fascinating on multiple levels. Thank you for the video!
I’ve been a sorter at a UPS location and I don’t really think that companies are hiding the fact they’re using manual sorting, people just don’t really ask that question
I loved this video, but I do feel like this is simply a good example of why we should always try to think of the other side’s point of view when placing criticism
Every company stays ancient with their technology because it’s simply way too expensive to switch, and they all estimate that the error margin is small enough to not make it worth it
5% error not being worth it is literally insane. Or are those numbers totally wrong? What was your/your unit's typical error rates when you did the job? Are those claims roughly reasonable? If it's 5%, and they take in 30 billion or something in revenue in a company like those he covered, then that would be 1.5 BILLION dollars of revenue from customers who have their packages mis-sent, and a good portion of that wasted by the company having to eat the cost of re-routing. How much could 20 sorting machines per a few hubs possible cost? Mayyybe close to 1.5 billion dollars But that's if they only lasted a year. They probably last 20 years. Makes no sense.
@@gavinjenkins899 Well considering that everything MegaLag said about the sorting in Frankfurt is wrong.. because they do infact have automatic sorting, what he showed was the small destination and failure sorting... meaning everything the machine failed to sort.
Otherwise each person on that stand would need to sort around 4k parcels per hour for their entire shift.... for reference the IPZ sorts around 450-480k parcels each day (more during christmas), good luck doing that with 21 sorting stations
I recently retired from USPS. In the last few years the error rates for packages have gone down significantly as the process has become nearly all automated. This includes using laptop or PC based scanners in separating parcels to the different routes in the final delivery units. Royal Mail, DHL and others need to follow this path to nearly full automation. When calculating the cost of of automation vs manual work, the added cost of the additional transport and resorting process for all of the mis-sent parcels adds up to a much higher cost than most people would realize.
My theory is that It will happen slowly, only until an small upstart with full automation pushes them to change.
I actually installed a number of UPS's automatic router conveyers here in the US. I can imagine those Siemens Routers and their fast scanners made sorting a breeze.
I installed them between the years of 2005 and 2009. I worked with RBI, DSG and ISI and did Fedex, UPS and USPS sorter and conveyer system's electrical install and debugging. In all cases we were partnered with Siemens for these projects. Last project I worked on in this capacity was a FedEx in Oklahoma City, Kansas. I still have nightmares of the hoop set up with busted fragile marked packages below. (It was right in front of a manager's office, so I do presume is was a twisted joke.)
You should ask these questions to the US Postal Service. They definitely have similar procedures and error rates as Royal Mail and PostNL and like you mentioned, also are a part of UPU. Since the USPS is a US government entity, they are subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which you can make a formal request for information for. With some key exceptions, most US government operations data is considered public record and is subject to FOIA. And in the event a FOIA is denied, there is an appeals process.
You would be surprised how much information can be hidden from FOI requests under law in most countries just for being commercially sensitive in a very broad sense.
USPS is pretty open about these mistakes, when asked. Lots of journalists have been given access to their sorting facilities
how do i do it ask Freedom of Information Act
What would be even more of a rabbit hole is how the sorting technology developed by the USPS and DARPA and technology developed for the USPS all at taxpayer expense was pretty much made available for free to competitors without any royalties or license fees collected and paid to the US Treasury.
@SteamCat as Margaret Thatcher stated, "What Society?"
There is no "Public Good" in today's neoliberal defined economy.
Having worked at one of the sorting centers for Postnord (which is the postal service for denmark and sweden), I can confirm that Sweden/Denmark also has a semi-manual process with a lot of manual sorting (difficult to read labels, handwritten labels, damaged labels and large parcels, among others)
Wow, that's thorough! Respect and many thanks for the hard work!!!
You have to give DHL credit for such polite and well thought out answers
Yea normally they just send automated response and that's it to contact him and to let him ask questions and go visit to see how it works and how easy it is to mess up is good really you don't expect that from big companies really.
If it takes someone getting millions of views across multiple videos to receive actual customer support (and not just automated responses like he was receiving before), I don't think they deserve any credit at all
yes for sure! Who ever from DHL was carrying out this email exchange would make a great politician hahaha, say as little detail as possible while deflecting all while acting nice and cooperative
That's what corporate communications staff is paid for.
But they're all non answers, they're corporate dribble
I give HUGE respect for DHL showing off and being frank about situations. I continue using it.
What a great video, I'm blown away by the lengths that you've gone to in order to highlight and investigate this issue.
In terms of automation, surely it shouldn't be that difficult at all, all the postage labels especially for registered/tracked post should have a digital copy of the address on file already, with the barcode being used to identify this. With the conveyor and much of the "movement" type infrastructure already in place, surely it shouldn't be too difficult to add some barcode scanners along the various conveyors and distribute as much as possible by automated means? Even if it means that any reject items have to be manually sorted, it should still be possible for at least most tracked items to be easily sorted by automated means.
I once had a parcel shipped from Chicago with USPS, that headed to London and then into the Caribean, where it was on vacation for two months. Then someone decided, it might be time to send it to Frankfurt eventually, from where it went to me as intended. And let me say one thing: Literally no postal service I had to deal with was worse than USPS. Funny thing though: After I had to register with all my personal information to find out about the whereabouts of my parcel, they told me they didn't know where my parcel was and still sent me e-mails monthly for about half a year that they still don't, after it already was delivered 😀
I've worked for 3 months as a local delivery driver for DHL. I haven't got any interesting insights but I am loving this whole postal service documentary series you got going on!
that could be the way to look into sorting mistakes
ask ppl like you how often they had wrond adresses given
@@alpbalcaev7583 A quick summary of the way it works at the final local distribution place is as follows. The big DHL truck arrives from a local sorting centrer to the cityhub. (The Netherlands has 16 sorting centers and 140 city hubs).
The truck gets emptied and the packages get sorted into numbered roll containers. (each number stands for a postal code) This is done with many people next to a roller bar transport belt. The parcels get labeled at the beginning of that transport belt with the same number as the roll container.
When that is finished the delivery drivers arrive, load their vans with the parcels from their assigned numbers/postal codes and do the final delivery.
Now what I can say about sorting.
Even when only dealing with local packages already sorting mistakes happen. The sorting workers put a parcel with Nr 27 in a container labled 28, or someone misread the 7 as a 1 for example. Pretty much every day I had to bring some misplaced parcels to the office so the other delivery guy can find his "missing package". (we scan each parcel individually when we load them in the van).
Those sorting mistakes are an easy fix but this is at the very end of the journey. Imagine that such mistakes happen earlier where there are so many parcels that double checking every parcel it isn't possible.
@@Joost. so all mistakes are sorted out in local facility before it reaches you
thats good
not for our cause but still
txh for reply
@@alpbalcaev7583 Yeah as I said I only know about the final delivery stuff. Based on what I do know though I think if a sorting mistake happens it will at least get caught at the next sorting place so a mistake only carries trough 1 trip at the time. (obviously given the fact that no further mistakes happen). But yeah if a sorting mistake happens before a long flight yeah it's gonna take a while to get sorted out if at all.
In other words the only mistakes I encounter as a delivery driver are the mistakes made by the local sorting team. (wrong postal code but right town for example). The local sorting team has to return wrongly sorted packages back to the big sorting center. If a mistake gets caught at the sorting center they ship it back by plane or truck to where that came from etc etc.
So there are a lot of "weakpoints" where a delivery can fail and the more mistakes happen the harder it gets to fix. When during all that the label also gets damaged or unreadable you can pretty much forget about your parcel, it's gone as far as DHL is concerned. So I do understand how they are quick to offer money instead of investigating.
The tagging things manually is because automating handwriting recognition is hard.
For about 10 years, I worked in a shop that scanned documents for archiving. If you've ever seen one of those machines that Google used to scan old books, we had one of those, but we also had high speed scanners that could scan documents by the page also (if we could remove the binding.) These scanners could do hundreds of sheets per minute.
The one thing I learned from this process - OCR (optical character recognition) is HARD. Even scanning documents from the 90's where Times New Roman was the default font, we'd still encounter sometimes dozens of scan errors on a page. And that's with a common, well recognizable font. I can't imagine the system that you would need to scan handwriting reliably enough for this type application. We had a team of about 5 who would go in and read documents that were flagged with suspected issues (it could see if a word was misspelled and then highlight that area on the page), and then the person would manually type in what was on the page. A number of times it was just that the scanner broke up a word into two sections (don't even get me started on hyphened words on line breaks) for example 'constitution' would end up as 'const' and 'itution', and the system would want to recommend that the second part was 'intuition', clearly wrong but it lacked the context to know the word prefacing it was related.
A lot of people are suggesting that AI models can be used to do this kind of work and while that's true, some of these industries are using custom embedded systems with bespoke software. Upgrading these, as the DHL representative pointed out, just doesn't make financial sense. The error rate for these (while notable in this case specifically) is probably fractions of a percent daily. Dozens of parcels out of tens or hundreds of thousands.
EDIT: Tom Scott did a video about how USPS processes theirs, it's mainly automated but a small percentage is keyed manually. Great video here: ua-cam.com/video/XxCha4Kez9c/v-deo.html
It's true that handwriting recognition is difficult, has inaccuracies, and can cause problems. There's no question about that. I would however like to ask why they can't be run through something that attempts to scan a barcode or recognize printed text, and if that fails, THEN send it to manual sorting? Why should they all go through manual sorting just because some of the packages have handwritten labels?
I thought I watched a Veritasium clip on the USPS for mail deliveries? they have centralized hubs for sorting address handwritings that machine cannot identify. They've cut down to a single hub in recent years because the machine was able to filter so much more now
@@iCarus_A I think there was also a Tom Scott video recently about the shop that processes them.
EDIT: this one: ua-cam.com/video/XxCha4Kez9c/v-deo.html
@@TheAruruu Indeed at least USPS processes most automatically and only manually reads and codes the ones that don't make it though.
I was also going to comment about this. My workplace has also done some digitization work for documents going back over the last 100 or so years, and while it is good enough for our purposes for text, just needing someone to proof read later, when it comes to the hand written notes attached, it was easier to hire a scribe to just type it in...
Stunning journalism delivered in an entertaining and informative way- bravo!
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!
You just showed us the video, you were there: At which point would they mark that a package was misrouted? Their system is designed for speed. Packages get misrouted to a place, that place doesn't check where the package originated they only check where it is going. To know it was misrouted they'd have to know it came from a specific location that it wasn't supposed to come from, but they don't pay attention to where a package comes from. If the package came out of a truck, off of their nets, the floor, or off the street, it gets thrown onto a conveyor where it goes to get sorted. No one marks, "Hey, I found this package in the nets." or "This package has a return address of USA but came from China." Basically, unless the package loops around and goes back to a facility it came from, there wouldn't really be anything in the data that shows it was misrouted. If the package was supposed to go from Germany to France and then to Japan, but it instead goes from Germany to Italy, then China, and on to Japan, how does that look like a misrouting? They probably use different airline companies (passenger planes) to route their packages, and they probably throw the packages on whatever flight is the cheapest and going the correct way at the time. They just check where it's going and punch in the code for where they think it's going, that's it. But the computers track them, right? Sure, but I'm betting they don't keep that data. Their metric is probably based on complaints, and even then they're probably tracking more how much they're refunding over how many complaints there actually are. Anyway, the only data the probably have is the ticket system of complaints, and not many companies want to disclose how many complaints they're getting if it's over a few percentage points. Also, the majority of the errors are probably ones that were pointed out in the video: Austria and Australia. Which, while scanning with a barcode scanner would be best, perhaps another alternative would be to double check problematic countries? But seriously, every grocery store I've ever been to in the last 20 years has had a handheld barcode scanner, how difficult is it for them to give their employees a handheld barcode scanner instead of a of numberpad keyboard?
100% impressed by the honestly and openness of DHL willing to do all this as opposed to shutting you out and considering legal options.
I wish more companies were like this and this made me a fan on theirs.
You dont just Cease & Desist a guy who managed 10M views on UA-cam. Smart PR knows this. A whole tour for him alone.
Turns out, DHL was willing to show their process because the entire industry is literally the same anyway.
I think you've stumbled on the primary reason that Amazon went so hard on building their own delivery service. There's a lot of automation in their process, though not nearly enough as much as they want. There's no way that Bezos would stand for upwards of a 10% error rate. That's positively insane. The outbound sorting at Amazon is literally the easiest part of the system to be automated. You might be able to get some additional data from them.
If it's all internal (as in one company or country) it's pretty easy to set up a robust system with sub 1% margin of error. But as we've seen in this video and in the comments if you start working with ontractors or more than 1 company along the way, it's easy for whatever you do to fall apart cause the next company down the line handling your package down the line can't be asked to upgrade. Also obligatory fuck Amazon and fuck Bezos for everything else they've been doing
I doubt it, considering Amazon doesn't ship internationally (except for third parties who than don't ship through amazon). And when they do ship internationally it simply goes through local mailing systems.
Ah yes, instead of manual sorting errors, they treat their workers worse (lest we forget the pee in a bottle incidents 😅)
@@DamianMarx boohoo 😭 noones forced to work there. Kindly go start your own company to prove them wrong…
Amazon is a huge contributer to the backup all around the world. Their 2 day shipping is what broke the system IMO. Traditionally packages would normally have an average of 3+ days. Amazons 1 and 2 day shipping to its members is free or or at a really low price, something like $5.99. If an individual with the same items tried to ship their packages with 1 or 2 days shipping, the cost would easily be 3x+ as much as it would have through Amazon
Really surprise DHL, being how large they are do not find it financially feasible to automate the scanning.
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Also for DHL to automate things , it not only take a lot of money, but years.
Having spent two tours in the Korean DMZ, owning Apple Air Tags and dealing with International mail routinely, your original story caught my attention. I was impressed with DHL’s apology. I had a horrendous delay for a package to Senegal but it was Senegalese Customs. Great followup! Sadly, mainstream media cannot match your professionalism!
I didn't expect to love this video this much
DHL's transparency is applaudable but it seems to show they know where their processes break down and are unwilling to change
I'm sure they'd be absolutely willing to change if it made financial sense. But even with the occasional Austr(al)ian parcel sent twice around the world manual sorting is still cheaper than automated. Which boggles the mind, because for that to happen either employees are way better than automas or paid dogshit wages. I suspect the latter.
@@konrad1428 Not everything should be about the money 🤷🏻♀️
@@konrad1428 Yes but how on earth do you automate such a complex process? Parcels come in so many different shapes and sizes - the address is written somewhere that is different for nearly every parcel and so on. The only way to automate this would be to sell packaging that is accepted JUST by DHL or simply to standardise packaging everywhere in the world, which is ugh, quite a challenge.
The employees there are not necessarily paid a bad wage (in my experience, sorting, packing and picking do tend to pay quite well compared to other physically demanding jobs[well, sorting is more mentally draining than anything]).
@@mabeSc Require your customers to use a printed label for parcel to be sent abroad, have a barcode for country. You can install barcodes as fonts on any machine and I'm sure if you don't have a printer yourself the postal service point you bring the parcel to could print it out too. It's 2022, there's no excuse for a handwritten address on a parcel.
@@konrad1428 The handwritten addresses are only a small part of the issue - how are you going to scan the barcode if it's on the other side of the parcel? Or simply rotated away?
Honestly, props to DHL for reciptiveness and transparency. Obviously things are still not perfect, but this was a great gesture to see
This is just a free promotion if anything.
They saw the previous videos and took their chances, there is no way they will give any random individual such well thought out answers and a tour lmao. Get real.
this is the kind of videos I love to watch.
In the Norwegian postal system, we've automated the sorting of mail, since at least 2015.
It is only in cases where the handwriting is very bad, or missing certain information, that a picture (of the parcel, not the parcel itself) is sent to an employee sat in an office, for (a) manual read/review/processing.
😮😅
The fact that DHL has decided not to automate this process, and allowing you to share this information, has made me very sceptical of ever using them in the future (are letters handled manually as well?).
I think they need to invest, and use some spreadsheet magic, to make their statements look better (like classify the new equipment as deteriorating, spreading the cost (of their income and expenditure statement) over 10 years.
😅
Because he choose to not even check what he saw... He saw the manual sorting part of the system.. the System is automated since at least 2019 with barcode scanners as well as adress cameras capable of sorting by adress without a code. The packages send to the manual system are the ones the system fails on.
For refernc. The IPZ sorts around 450k letters and small parcels each day and he mentioned 21 such manual stations. Meaning the average worker would have to sort around 900 parcels per hour if they worked 24/7 which they do not do. more than 70% of the parcels are sorted during the nighshift so each worker would need to sort at least 4k parcels per hour... which is simply impossible.
Again a simple google search on his behalf would have told him as much, yet he choose to make stuff up out of ignorance
@@1996Horst yeah definitely some questionable stuff in this video... not a lot of critical thinking IMO, and taking numbers and grand statements at face value.
„Like any good tinder date, I asked if I could bring a camera and a friend“ 💀 love that your not slowing down on the awesome jokes, even in a more „serious“ and investigative video 😊😍
Haha thanks man 🤣
@@MegaLag hey, I used to work for FedEx (U.S. location) and have some info that corroborates your findings. Would it be best to leave a comment or send an email or something? You mentioned we should drop you a line, so here I am. :)
Honestly, this all makes a lot of sense, and is probably a big reason why Amazon has moved to shipping their own stuff where possible - not to mention profits with Prime. Though, I do realize that you yourself can’t go into an Amazon store and ship something to some other entity which eliminates the majority of those address issues unless the customer entered the wrong address on the site or app.
Outstanding job on the video! This just proves once again that older things commonly don’t like change. :P
His tinder experience seems to be several rungs above mine.
When I worked at UPS I was amazed to find out that all packages are manually sorted, scanned, & packed by humans. I thought it was odd that if a package was sorted wrong, scanned wrong, & put into the wrong truck, there was nothing you could do. The package would just go to the wrong location. I thought it was odd their scanners wouldn’t warn you if a package was scanned into the wrong truck. I never understood why they didn’t upgrade the scanners to give a warning or something. It slowed down their whole operation. Because the person loading the trucks had to manually check every single package with their eyes to make sure the addresses matched correctly with the truck then scan it & load it. It was a 24/7 operation & the only automation was conveyor belts.
UPS always loses my stuff
Bruh what the fuck are you talking about. I've worked for FedEx distribution for 3 and a half years and not a SINGLE package of any form is manually coded for location. The literal ONLY thing humans do is stack the packages from the belts (small goods) and the shoots (large goods) correctly into the semi trailers. That is literally it. EVERYTHING else is done by lasers, computers, and robots.
Still, UPS does a much better job than DHL. Trust me!
I work for UPS and now they have scanners that let you know if the package is in the wrong truck due to the label that they now use too on the packages. These scanners are insane and fast how they scan everything.
@@sonyx5332 Do the scanners notify you as you’re scanning? Cause we never knew a package was in the wrong truck until after it left. A supervisor would get a report, & then let us know later we screwed up. It was a really awful system. All they had to do was program the scanners to give a warning or reject the wrong packages for each truck. However our scanners scanned everything whether it was in the wrong truck or not. I got nothing but respect for those guys loading trucks. It’s not really all that hard, it’s just really boring after a while. You never really get caught up, it’s like digging a ditch & filling it back in over & over.
Fascinating video !! And yeah DHL really went out of their way to show how things can go wrong and they're not just being negligent. Like, just because they didn't know where your item was--sitting in a blue bag--it wasn't exactly "lost." But they need to fix that informational gap and have a system that notes that the parcel is "sitting in a blue bag." I mean, how many customers call and ask where their package is when it hasn't arrived after 50 days? Probably 100%. I get that they want the blue bags to fill up before they are sent. But give it like 7 days, then have some other workaround like putting it in a box, so it doesn't get "lost or damaged." Of course, the real reason they don't sent near-empty bags is probably due to it being cost-inefficient.
how have i only just found your channel?! i was recommended the Colour Blind Glasses Video and now im on a MegaLag binge
Thanks! I’m glad you like my content 💙
I actually work for DHL in the UK and as far as I'm aware, the hub I work at has an entirely automated sorting system, but this video has honestly surprised me with how many parcel companies still use manual sorting systems. Great video, really enjoyed watching your previous AirTag videos too, keep up the great work!
Thanks for sharing!
Do you handle domestic or international packages? I’m tending to believe that domestic operations are largely automated, but international is manual in many cases
@@Muhahahahazit probably all depends on the location. These hubs may run for decades and are just not updated frequently because of the cost associated to this.
Worked at FedEx distribution center for 3 and a half years, not a single form of any package is coded for location manually. This manual sorting is absolutely fucking absurd.
This is genuinely some of the best investigative journalism I have ever seen. Can’t wait to see what you do next!
What a compliment! Thank you :D
Minus the part where he didn't immediately run out to a store and buy a mic, or beg/borrow one from someone else, to be able to do the in-person interview with UPU. That was a pretty big fuck up.
I would normally say i wouldn't be caught dead watching this long of a video on the postal industry, however you seem to have caught and maintained my attention throughout this entire video.
I recently paid $30 more for a parcel through DHL cause I had excellent experience with them years ago. It got here later (despite leaving before) a cheaper FedEx parcel. It's sad how far they've fallen.
15:46 It's precisely because it's international mail that it's needs doing manually. A lot of domestic mail in a lot of different countries is now sorted automatically, but international mail, with its label formats that vary from one country to another (despite the supposed standardisation rules), and its array of languages and even varying alphabets is much harder to automate without the system rejecting more than it manages to actually sort.
This needs more likes to get to the top
this seems like such bs, these parcels have a standardized format, the one that the actual company you pay to send it decides on, if they can't even scan their own format then that is again their own fault.
incomming mail would be handled differently and could then be sorted manually as a mistake has it land in the wrong town rather than wrong continent.
@@ThaGr1m Ok, I could have got the wrong end of the stick then, but my understanding is/was that the facility in the video would be handling mail that was posted through different companies depending on which country it was posted in. For example a parcel being sent in the UK would be following Royal Mail's choice of label format, a parcel sent from The Netherlands would be following post.nl's label format and so on. I personally sort domestic mail in the UK, and the mail we handle that is destined for addresses in our postal sector, but happened to come into the country from abroad, definitely has different label formats, and even address formatting, depending on which country and company the parcel came in from.
@@MrDannyDetail yeah I understand the confusion but what the main issue is that the parcels are being sent to the wrong country from their country of origin, which means the missort happens at the centers of the parcel service you use to send it in the first place. for instance in the uk most packages for export would be sent by royal mail to other countries meaning they should by all accounts be able to make a scanner work for their own packages.
also there are more than enough ways of doing this where label barely matters in the first place, one of the big ones being just a barcode scanner. if I as the end recipient can enter a bar code manually into a track and trace and clearly see my address an internal server could also easily be able to find the address and sort based of that. it's known information, that is what is so nuts about this all.
you make a label at home and have to input each field of data meaning not only is everything known it's also automatically sorted for the system. the country is in the country box, town in the town box etc. etc.
it boggles the mind how it's possible for the entire world to be able to use universal barcodes in all stores yet a billion dollar industry to be baffeled by it... even though THEY USE IT IN THE NEXT STEP... like tf went wrong there
@@ThaGr1m I would have assumed that the majority of export parcels from Royal Mail would be going out to facilities in Europe or elsewhere, like the one in the video, with only a small number of sorting destinations (cages, pallets etc) that Royal Mail can actually sort them to, rather than RM sending out 200+ planes each day to different countries and territories.
When I, as a parcel sorter myself, scan tracked domestic parcels I only get a beep to indicate a successful scan (or a slightly different one for an unsuccessful one, if for example it is not from our tracked service, but is ordinary first or second class mail) and my number of scanned parcels on the screen goes up by one. I do not get any information about the parcel address on my screen at all, but even if I did it would only be an identical match for what was on the parcel (barring keying-in errors if a parcel with a handwritten address was taken to a post office counter and the postage label was generated by the counter assistant), and what is on the parcel in and of itself might well be wrong, or at least misleading, so for printed labels with barcodes or QR codes it wouldn't actually be any more help for me to be able to see. Incidentally in the rare cases that a label has been damaged and the address lost, but the QR code is still intact, it is possible for me to recover an address from the QR code if I first sign right out of my scanner, and then scan it as the 'user' on the logon screen, which will then give me a full address in the 'user' box, but this is not possible with the regular barcode, only with the 2d QR codes, so the information is at least directly and unencryptedly stored in the QR code.
I'm assuming that when you have loads of sorting facilites each sorting thousands of items of mail an hour, you wouldn't want them all sending thousands of data requests to the server in head office every hour, and every single parcel waiting that extra second (or whatever it may be) for the server to send the requested data back before it can be sorted, although I admit I'm somewhat guessing that that may be the issue.
As a postman for Royal Mail, I was amazed to know that sorting machines would sort letters in seconds, and then would end up being delivered by a push bike.
Here in Canada, the Canada Post service gives delivery of mail out to any employee with a car during peak times which is always funny to see. I remember back in the day, your car had to have a rhd conversion, but now people just pull up on the wrong side of the road to put mail into the mailboxes.
Probably because those conveyor belts don't exactly go all the way to the recipient's door. Weird concept, I know.
I think an important factor in all of this is whether you’re discussing international or domestic packages. I’ve worked parcel delivery for fedex air in America and how we handled domestic and international packages was completely different. I can’t speak to how these are sorted at the big facilities in Anchorage or Memphis, but fedex has automated country codes for international packages and the local station ID is printed above the barcode and there are other letters that serve as sorting assistants. For instance, a package going from LA to Boston would have an X placed before the station code to indicate that it needed to be loaded onto the plane at a certain time of day to meet the priority overnight threshold. Sorters at the airport facilities are instructed to place packages with like codes into the same bins. Some cans would be devoted to east coast packages, or local ones not requiring a plane, or ones with international destinations. This sorting is largely by hand at the local stations, but there is a large and easy to read letter that indicates what bin it should go in. Granted, this might be specific to US domestic parcels and letters as that is the scope of my experience
I think a big hinderance to the automated sorting of international packages is addresses themselves. Address standards are not the same across countries. Hell, there are a ton of ways in which US addresses can be weird! Apparently one of the most difficult countries to print addresses for was China. I have family living there and they live in Shanghai, so not a tiny backwater. Getting the zip code to load correctly was incredibly difficult for one of the largest cities in the world! This applies to countries like China sending parcels to America as well. Parcels from there would frequently be typed in incorrectly and the addresses would end up as a jumbled mess. I’m wondering if it’s an issue with someone knowing how to use an English language keyboard when English is not their native language. Adding spaces or characters in the wrong places can cause a package to get lost because the computer cannot read it. This also applies to newly constructed houses that have addresses that technically don’t exist yet
I don’t have much insight into writing algos for automated systems, but international addresses have a lot of factors that probably make it tricky. That doesn’t even get into importation laws and crossing certain borders. I’ve heard about Canadians having to wait for weeks for packages to be shipped from the US, and that would definitely be more difficult in a conflict zone or a country with extremely strict borders
I’m guessing that offering to send parcels to North Korea is mostly a publicity stunt by these companies. Import and trade laws make getting anything into that country extremely difficult so it’s a gamble from the start. That doesn’t mean that parcel logistics companies have not room for improvement. One of my friends works at an airport sorting facility and they still clock in using paper time cards in the year of our lord 2023! FedEx air has invested in more sophisticated gps assistance for delivery drivers but it’s very janky and doesn’t work very well. Amazon has probably invested in this too, but their drivers seem to frequently get lost and a lot of them are poorly trained because they’re employees of contractors, not Amazon. I also think that package delivery drones are decades away at best. Addresses in Anytown America can be extremely hard to interpret and find and many houses are unsuitable for drone flight. I can’t see a drone faring well around a house with several overgrown trees for instance, not to mention apartments. Very few complexes have mailrooms to drop off packages in my experience
Anyways, I’ll stop rambling about parcel logistics. It’s a fascinating industry to me and I admit that I would have loved to attend that conference and I hope I could provide some insight from the inside. I think a big improvement to this kind of study would be delineating between domestic and international parcels. The level of development in a country is very important. Logistics in France is different from India or Namibia, or China. Every country has its own norms and laws. Improving automation in pacel delivery is a fascinating topic!
I discovered your channel thru the colorblind video a few hours ago, I’ve binged all your videos since then hahaa awesome channel, i. Hope you start posting more frequently
Amazing video. For a UA-camr with like 10 vids you’re doing so well, honestly u should have millions of subs. I respect that u don’t post a small update every week to get the view money. You actually care and have waited 8 months to make a masterpiece. Massive respect, keep it up
Thanks man, it’s nice when people notice the effort. Not sure I can keep to this level of commitment though. Felt like I had 3 burnouts producing this.
I have a ton of ideas, but not enough resources. Would love to hire help once I can afford it!
@@MegaLag huge respect for the focus on quality. I hope that you don’t encounter more burnout in the future. I really enjoy the efforts you go to in producing this content.
@@MegaLag UA-cam videos are just as much an art form as painting. I'm not sure if it'll matter much, but in my years of watching UA-cam, and my attempts at running a few channels, it seems really easy to get caught up in how much better a video COULD be, rather than focusing on how good it is NOW relative to your own situation. No "cult classic" movie exists that doesn't have something that could've been better. If you feel like you're contributing something to the discussion, then it's already as valuable as can be. You don't need super fancy graphics to tell a story, but they do look real good! Like you said you have many more ideas, so maybe try to find a compromise between the quality you want, and the quality you can reasonably produce; you can always hire someone in the future to help out. Keep up the good work, and don't get too stressed out you have a lot of time to tell more stories my man
@@MegaLag well with what you now know about how packages are handled, i believe there is an opportunity to abuse their claims system to make some money :p
@@MegaLag Tell us what you need! I'm sure many would love to work with you.
For someone with such a high level of audio visual quality, professional editing, and confidence infront of a camera and interviewing… I was not expecting such a small UA-cam channel. You are easily deserving of a few million subs with your deep dive analysis into your topics. Definitely subbing after this
is 200k really 'small' haha! but yes, deserves way more :D
I think if he uploads a little bit more he would get so much more subs I really think this channel would be ALOT bigger if he uploaded more
I started watching this whole DHL AirTag journey when the first video dropped and got recommended to me, now i got this one here once again, ironically now having an Apprenticeship at Deutsche Post as a Mailman, oh how ironic this is
not seen this channel before, love the way you tell your story, so have subbed which i rarely do halfway through first video ....
I am so invested in this investigation at this point I can’t wait for further updates. Your dedication and thoroughness is incredibly impressive and the way you present your content is easy to understand, informative and entertaining. Not sure what your plans are for your channel or career but would love to see you do more deep dive investigations like this on a range of other shady business practices. The banking industry, airliners, there’s so much you could explore. If you really enjoy doing this kind of work, and it seems like you do, you may have found your calling as an investigative journalist and could make a big difference in bringing about change.
You hit the nail on the head with what the problem really is - lack of competition driving complacency. All these people who have had their packages misrouted or been lied to and said a package was lost and there is no recourse for the companies making the mistakes. Customers often cannot simply choose a competitor or send their mail another way so they are stuck dealing with companies who do not need to innovate because there is no recourse for mediocrity.
Excellent video, very interesting journalism
Complacency exists even when there is competition.
@@utubepunk yes, however those complacent companies drop off eventually due to the competition noticing said complacency. all these companies need is for even one company to start up and suddenly end up everywhere to put all of them in danger of going under. making a cheaper, faster, more efficient service with a low error rate would endanger over 90% of the shipping industry in one go.
Sure its complacency but adding Automation to this facilities would takes a lot of time and money and it is probably cheaper to keep manual sorting until a new facility is required to handle an increase in volume.
Thanks man! You've done a hell of a job analyzing this. You should work on the incident commissions.
"Like any good tinder date, I asked if I could bring a camera and a friend to film the experience" that got me 😂
It’s insane there’s still manual sorting of this level!
I hate DHL, but props to them for allowing you to do this! Glad to see a follow up video after a year or so!!
If you think this level of manual sorting is ancient wait until you see Alaska USPS
There is still manual sorting, because fully automatic sorting would require imposing strict packaging and label preparation procedures on customers. A company could do that, but you'll lose customers, who demand flexibility. Companies still allow handwritten shipping labels, and they are loath to lose that business. Customers want to use their own packaging, as is comfortable and convenient for them.
@@PRH123 disagree with this. They could make a machine that scans all side of the package for the label. It either sorts it or if unsure dumps it to a real person who can manually sort it from there.
@@LEGnewTube many sorts have exactly such equipment and have for years, it’s not new technology, and it weighs and dimensionally weights the packages at the same time…. but it doesn’t fundamentally resolve all of the issues that cause Mis-sorts and mis-routes…
Amazon does this too dont be too surprised
Honestly just escalated real quick from simply wanting to test if you can put GPS through North Korea to actually exposing the pool passport companies
Great video, you've earned a new sub with this one!
The reason DHL has not yet updated is because there is no real automated system for this unique challenge that they face. Most packages are hand written this makes it impossible for “an affordable investment into automation viable”. Even if they made use of bar code scanners there errors will only be made more frequently. The types of systems used to automate this type of task are way faster that bing sed they make just as many mistakes if not more. On top of this they have to way up loss of job opportunities, cost of maintaining and powering such equipment plus the time lost in implementing such a system would likely require them to build all new facilities and infrastructure plus training. Having a few 1000 packages lost every day really is a small price to pay when you consider the cost of change. Love the video keep it up❤
I've worked for New Zealand Post for a few years. Their sorting is also manual; both inbound and outbound. The shocking part is that every parcel inbound to NZ is re-labeled, simply because 30y/o systems can't scan international bar codes.
During my time there, I personally designed and wrote a proof of concept to automate inbound parcel scanning using barcodes and machine learning and avoid re-labeling. It was not adopted not because of cost, but because of the lack of skill and will of the exec and IT teams to do anything. I left shortly after that. These companies are just politics-focused dinosaurs; and they have no will or skill to innovate.
You are being unkind to dinosaurs. They *DID* move!
Other than that,you are correct, IMHO!
Having no skill to innovate is hard to say, with billions of profit. You can simply hire people with such skills, so I think its really down to the will.
Let them rot
The founder of the company simply vanished.
Actually if you understand how big corp works, you understand why it is expensive, because it really is, and you also understand why they do not take stuff made by you as someone that works there.
The first aspect is the cost, now you can argue that what you made was given for free and a lot cheaper to implement, but the corporate side here is, they have no one accountable and have to shoulder the burden and the developer resources for this.
Your solution has to be implemented, tested, run in, and they have to account for the bus factor, meaning they will have to hire another developer that knows it, write documentation just in case say you get hit by a bus the next day!
This is the headache a lot of corporates try to avoid and thus they want a solution that avoids this.
That solution is outsourcing or buying a 3rd party solution.
Usually these have a track record to point to, they have developers, they give the corporate CEOs a single point of contact... The drawback? It costs a lot more than your implemented solution as not only do they have to have the development staff for both hardware and software, certifications, backup personell, but they also want to make a profit so they can stay in business.
When you tally it up at the end of the day, you get to a monstrous cost that can make some customers like DHL say "NOPE! For that sum we can stash the missent packages in a spare bin or the bulk hold of our 747 for minimal costs!"
And THAT is why they never pull the trigger unless they have to.
It's not just a DHL problem or a postal service problem. Logistics in general isn't as advanced as you might think. Every company, whether they offer logistics as a service or not, has internal logistics and most of them still work like it's 1990. I did 3 years vocational training to become a "specialists for warehouse logistics" in Germany, (sounds fancier than it is, we just referred to each other as "Lageraffen", warehouse monkeys)
during which I visited different companies and industrial fairs like cemat, which focuses on intra logistics. They harp on about industry 4.0, cloud computing, cyberphysical systems etc. but in reality we are still living in industry 3.0 which started in the 70's (1.0 being the industrial revolution and 2.0 introducing mass production and the use of electrical energy. 3.0 introduced automation, as well as digitalisation). A lot of things are still done manually because it's cheap and failure rates are acceptable and digital systems often still run on windows XP or older systems.
Modern hightech industry 4.0 does exist and it's what they like to show you but it's not the norm in my experience.
I think that you are underestimating how hard it is to keep system like that reliable for a long time. Especially if it should run on different versions of operating system.
@@mrkv4k They will have engineers monitoring it and updating it.
@@alexc4924 You have no idea how much work that would take to do that properly. It's much easier to run an decade old program on a decade old system and upgrade when it's really obsolete.
All I can say is we’ve done that to a large extent at our facility and, while it does take a decent amount of maintenance, the workers pick up how to do the troubleshooting quickly and it is effective.
It cost far less and far less hazel to underpay some person to sort stuff wrong VS paying and maintaining automation. If there was a penalty for sorting it wrong then sure automation makes sense. But since automation and computers in general is a PITA it is understandable people are doing it by hand.
Problem is that there needs to be more hands doing it. IF anyone cared about the service. Since they are just throwing and giving no f about the environment and anything but there profits. DHL deserve credit for being so open to show it. Honestly.
Even if automation cost to much. And maybe the no care in handling the packages without throwing and dropping... Point I was going for is that maybe there should be a manual check after the first one to make sure the stuff was placed right. And if that cost to much get some dam bark codes on there and scan in the bloody things!
Do not trust or care about environmental BS talk. There is so much that needs to change behind closed doors before the forward facing needs to improve... SO so much everywhere. So much.
I’m convinced that your work alone will somehow have a massive impact. Imagine that they actually set new transparency regulations for the industry that pushes them to improve their systems. Fantastic work!
The postal industry has next to zero accountability. I don't expect anything to change even if there was a massive public outcry, let alone a couple of videos on youtube.
@@mrtelevision8079 Usps has a 1% loss rate. And they even make money selling lost packages. And nothing will change
This mega chad alone let the DHL and PostNL realize they are not going to be able to send parcels to North Korea... No one is probably sending anything there in the first place but still.
@@mrtelevision8079 The fact that DHL addressed most of his concerns, and the level of exposure this series is having gives me hope. The outcome will probably take years, but someone had to point a finger at the problem, and this is an excellent way to do so.
Regarding automation, aside from costs in developing such solutions the real _main_ issue is that those addresses will generally be hand-written, and in the cases they are printed or stamped, there is not standardized postal font (afaik). While OCR indeed can be used to scan handwritten text in an image, this is a process riddled with flaws and errors. Minor idiosyncrasies in the writer can throw it off, not to mention mayor ones such as calligraphy and such. Add to that how sometimes ppl fail a bit when writing (ie. a typo, or smudged character) and it would also need to be a able to figure out when addresses need correction. And singular alphabets can't be used either, as letters can come from any country, and can be a writing system using any kinds of diacritics. So the problem explodes in complexity to ALL known writing-systems.
Then we add stuff like you mentioned, how places can have all kinds of different names, and those would need to be documented as well.
Finally, the fact that packages and letters comes in all shapes, forms, and sizes, means the scanner would also need to accomodate not merely skewing and warping, but _skewing and warping that changes depending on where on the label you look!_ Including the kind where the label gets a wrinkle or even a fold of the label gluing to itself.
Of course, having an automated system _before_ the humans, that can sort the obvious things by itself and forwards the rest to humans, would still be worthwhile. It would both ease the pressure on the humans giving them more time per package (or more likely, the company just fires some and staffs fewer), as well as increase accuracy for the ones it doesn't forward. (more on this later, in a section I will be describing a possible automation solution that would actually prolly work when facing real world issues).
Additionally, I think they really should have a human in a step after the humans sorted them, performing a validation step: they would see the recorded destination, and the letter itself, and have 2 big buttons (red and green) they can hit to verify whether it is correct or not (if they hit the red button, letter goes back to sorters with a counter to see how many times it returned). Main reason I see for this is not just mistakes in the sorting from misreading, but also in how easy it is for a human to mistype the combination to something else than they intended (as anyone working with a numpad inputting data from paper would know).
Finally, as to how an automated system would ideally work:
While OCR has improved and could arguably be used somewhat, truth is that it is already a solved issue when we can control both the writer and the reader. I mentioned it in passing before, but first step would be a standardized font (or set thereof). Second would be to use qr-codes or other similar geometric shapes that allows image recognition to find the position, angle, scale, and (perspective?-)skew of the data to read, placed in each corner of the label. Third is to have the labels data fields position/size inside this area be standardized.
And then make sure to also include a bar-/qr-code (or more than one for redundancy) with all this info encoded. The text-based information is just backups, mainly used in case the machine judges a human needs to process the package (though also to allow ocr to make an attempt if the QR data is corrupted somehow).
So when someone wants to send a letter, the sender fills in data on a machine designed for the purpose (instead of write it themselves; and a dedicated machine is not even required, but they could instead have a printer at home and produce the label with a little generator on their post-office's website), which prints a label that they put on their letter or package.
They would fill in a form on a digital machine (where ie. the country is not free-form, but rather as they write a search is done to present a list of which country they searched for and they select one - modern dropdown-box UI), ensure the details looks correct, have it print a label (with the important information in big, and put it on their letter/package in some good spot.
Of course, the chaotic nature of packages and letters means their geometry might affect the label, such that the reader _still_ fails to read it (ie. it gets warped, torn, or whatever), at which point it is, like normal, sent to the human sorters with all the hand-written letters that didn't use this system. And they read the text-based info on the label to sort it.
Overall, this system is good because it operates on the assumption that humans are still needed. Not every sender will use the system (or even have the option to!), and even when they do, issues might arise that still requires human sorting. But as adoption increases among post-offices (and thus their senders), the automated sorting will increase more and more in terms of the impact it has, making everything more efficient, faster, and accurate. And eventually the _majority_ will be handled by it, and the human(s) left to handle its scraps will have a low enough workload that they can afford not only taking time to be certain, but even validate themselves whenever there's downtime in the input of unhandled letters, or have confirmation prompts when they input country-codes.
DHL's new ad slogan:
═DHL═
_"We Can Only Apologize for This"_
Stumbled across this video by UA-cam doing what UA-cam does. Then I went and watched the video you did explaining a bit of your background and the issues you were having with a German Freelance Visa. I can tell you, if you are not an investigative journalist, you are missing your calling. This was insanely in-depth, laid out perfectly and at a pace that was neither boring nor too rapid fire. Kudos on such a well done explanation of the various postal systems and I look forward to whatever you decide to do moving forward.
That's real journalism right there, you didnt stopped at the first answer, you went further. Very well-produced video, thanks for the effort and your time.Subbed
MegaLag: DHL has some pretty sus practices.
DHL: We follow all industry standard shipping practices.
MegaLag: if that's the case, then the entire industry is pretty sus.
DHL: Exactly!
MegaLag: ... wha?