Lockheed Martin wins Postal Service parcel sorting work

Lockheed Martin Corp. won a $17.4 million contract to improve the automated parcel sorting systems at U.S. Postal Service's bulk mail centers.

The Bethesda, Md., company will install 38 optical character recognition systems on secondary parcel sorting systems, known as Singulation Scan Induction Units, at 19 bulk mail centers.

Optical character recognition technology uses computer software that translates images of typewritten text, captured by scanners, into machine-editable and readable text. The Postal Service uses the technology to sort packages by reading the addresses on them instead of analyzing only the barcodes.

Because many packages that pass through Postal Service bulk mail centers do not have barcodes, they require manual processing. With optical character recoginition technology, most of these parcels can be directly processed by the scanning units, thus reducing the need for multiprocessing operations and manual handling.

Lockheed Martin has about 135,000 employees and had annual revenues of $37.2 billion in fiscal 2005. The company ranks No. 1 on Washington Technology's 2006 Top 100 list of the largest federal IT contractors.