Pitney Bowes Announces IoT Platform for Mail Delivery

Global technology company Pitney Bowes, known for its shipping, mailing and postal machines, announced today the launch of its IoT suite, Clarity. Built on GE’s Predix platform, Clarity brings real-time analytics and predictive maintenance to the shipping and mail industry. It’s the first commercially available solution to come from Pitney Bowes’ collaboration with GE, which began last year.

“The Industrial Internet is transforming everything from aviation to healthcare to oil field and energy services,” said Yonatan Hagos, general manager of emerging verticals for GE Digital, in a press release. “The Pitney Bowes Clarity solutions suite demonstrates how companies are using cloud technologies – like the Predix platform – and analytics to transform their go to market strategy and reinvent their businesses.”

Clarity has three parts, Advisor, Optimizer and Schedule. According to Pitney Bowes’ website, Advisor uses sensor data to provide real-time insights on emerging trends and patterns, allowing operators to spot potential issues before they become big problems, reducing downtime and inefficiencies.

Optimizer uses sensor data and analytics to determine the most efficient and productive combinations of users and machines.

Scheduler uses a variety of real-time data points, including available operators and equipment, job volume, and planned downtime into a dynamic schedule that changes as the variables do. Scheduler automatically adjusts to accommodate high priority jobs.

“In its simplest form, production mail is about getting the right information, in the right envelope, to the right customer at precisely the right time, millions of times each day,” said Jason Dies, president, Pitney Bowes document messaging technologies in the announcement.

“It is an industry measured in tenths-of-pennies and fractions-of-seconds. Clarity provides our clients with a view of their operations and our industry on a micro and global level that was never before visible – from the performance of a specific motor on a single machine, to the productivity benchmarks of leading print and mail operations around the world,”

The company says Clarity will be available on their North American machines this month, in Europe in Q2 and worldwide next year.

Related: GE signs 15 customers for digital power plant

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