The South African Post Office has been able to reduce the number of postal orders it holds at any one time from over 21 million to 6 million, thanks to a new system which is underpinned by Scantec, a company in the Datatec Group.
"Previously, the Post Office would have its postal orders pre-printed and divided up into denominations, as with ordinary money," says Roland Pinz, national media sales manager at Scantec. "This meant an average of 3.3 pieces of paper for the typical postal order transaction, all of which the Post Office would have to keep in stock."
Under the new system, the value of the postal order is now printed onto one piece of paper at point of sale, with the value encrypted into barcodes on the form, all printed by the Scantec-supplied Datamax printers.
"The savings are huge, not only in terms of the SA Post Office not having to pre-print and supply millions of postal orders to all its branches, but also in terms of the time saved with the new system," Pinz says.
The printers were initially bought from Scantec to perform conventional barcode printing functions which underpin the Post Office's track-and-trace systems, but were quickly adapted to the new function once their full potential was determined.
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