The Sima 220, which is distributed in the UK by Friedheim International, lines up with any inserter and automates the pre-sorting and letter-tray preparation processes.

Sales specialist Adrian Mills said the launch was prompted by the move from bags to trays, marked by the likes of the Royal Mail seeking to migrate to Mailmark tracking within two years.

“This is a very fast, accurate and labour-saving device,” he said of the machine costing around £100,000. “The Sima 220 de-mans the back-end of the process.

“It is targeted at the DM and high-volume transactional markets, the big PLCs and the likes of Polestar and Communisis.”

Mills said one UK customer in the South East was looking to install six on one site, while a US customer had snapped up 10.

The machine can process envelopes up to 6mm thick, weighing up to 100g and runs at up to 20,000 envelopes per hour depending on envelope size and quality.

According to Friedheim, it has a changeover time of less than 10 minutes and a tray change of two seconds. Large tray magazines – 1ft and 2ft trays – meanwhile enable uninterrupted production.

It checks for open flaps, non-readable addresses and IMB barcodes and automatically rejects any letter that should not be delivered.

The company said that another advantage was that various reading systems include simple print-mark readers up to a server-based OCR/IMB system connected to the digital front-end.

A patented collection unit also stacks the envelopes individually thereby making twisting or interleaving “almost impossible”, according to Friedheim.

The envelope stack is quickly pressed before filling the letter trays, while exchange of letter trays occurs automatically. The ability to intermix 1ft and 2ft letter trays is a unique feature for the machine, according to Friedheim.

As an option, a postcode label printer can be integrated into the Sima, which applies a label to the letter tray. The filled letter trays are temporarily stored on a large buffer section. 

A sequence repair system (SRS), which marks or separates mail that does not belong to the actual mail sequence, comes as standard on the machine.

The Sima can instruct the operator on what to do with the marked or separated mail, helping to ensure a constant production speed even when sequence problems appear.