Success Stories

Company Success Stories - Siemens AG

Siemens' Recognition Equipment, Powered By AMD Athlon™ MP Processors, Speeds U.S. Postal Service Delivery And Boosts Efficiency

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Siemens AG
http://www.siemens.com
September 1, 2002

"AMD Athlon™ MP processors have fully met our expectations. - John Zatopek"

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) delivers more than 200 billion pieces of mail each year to over 137 million delivery addresses. The ever-present challenge it faces is to improve speed and reduce errors.

A proven approach to augmenting postal delivery performance has been to rely upon one of the world's leading automation experts, Siemens AG. One division of the parent company, Siemens Dematic Postal Automation L.P. (SDPA), supplies all facets of automation to the USPS, including letter sorting, flats sorting, material handling and optical character recognition (OCR).

Traditionally, processing flats, or large envelopes, catalogues and magazines has been one of the most labor-intensive sorting processes for the USPS. Until recently, the sorting system was primarily manual and mechanized. Automation of these processes has been a long-term goal.

For the past several years, automation efforts at the USPS have relied upon Siemens' Automated Flat Sorting Machine (AFSM100), a system that offers a conveyor with adaptability to robotic handling and on-line video encoding for processing flat mail images. The AFSM100 flat sorter feeds more than two mail pieces per second on each of three in-feed stations. Each in-feed path contains a line scan camera and a flats address reader computer. The recognition software must process the mail piece image delivered by the line scan camera to locate the POSTNET code and destination address block, perform recognition functions on both, and validate the results against an on-board copy of the national directory.

Since 1999, Siemens has relied upon a leading edge, dual processor workstation class system to meet these performance requirements. Within a few months of the introduction of the AMD Athlon™ MP processor in 2001, Siemens began evaluating its potential for powering their OCR System for the Upgraded Flats Sorting Machine 1000 (UFSM1000).

After evaluating the CPUs then being used to power its embedded recognition workstations, and after performing internal benchmark testing, Siemens elected to deploy a dual AMD Athlon MP processor-based solution. Siemens realized significant price/performance improvements over the workstation solution deployed on the earlier AFSM100 program.

Siemens called upon M&A Technology to provide the AMD processor-based computer solutions for the UFSM1000 OCR applications. M&A Technology focuses on delivering stable, high quality computers for dedicated applications.

"It's all about maximizing the read rate and minimizing the error rate," said John Zatopek, senior engineering specialist at SDPA. "When we evaluate processors, we're looking at the milliseconds each processing step requires. In our tests, we inject images of test mail pieces from a database. When we ran our test results, AMD Athlon MP processors proved to be the better choice."

In 2001 Siemens instituted a performance improvement program for the AFSM100. One phase of this program involves deploying Secondary Address Reader (SAR) software running on independent processing hardware for every OCR system. Siemens evaluated several dual CPU workstation configurations for the SAR application and based on performance benchmarks and competitive price quotations, again selected an AMD processor-based solution with M&A Technology. These soon-to-be-deployed systems will be powered by AMD Athlon MP processors.

"When you consider the U.S. Postal Service, with its huge volume of mail, a one or two percent improvement in the read rate can save hundreds of millions of dollars," said Zatopek. "We signed a contract to provide a complete hardware/software solution that could meet the rigorous throughput, read rate, and error rate performance requirements, and we have done so. AMD Athlon MP processors have fully met our expectations. We've been pleased with the reliability they provide."

"There's often someone who might question why a company would switch to a different component supplier," said Zatopek. "Someone who's ready to point the finger or second-guess your decision. But it all comes down to performance. If it tests well, that's it. We saw the price/performance ratio we were looking for with AMD Athlon MP processors. In business, you have to go with the numbers."

© 2002 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved.
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