Royal Mail has installed automated machinery in its Bristol centre to speed up the sorting of parcels.
The new technology will mean parcels are no longer manually sorted by workers, who could have their hours reduced as a result.
The company says there will be no compulsory redundancies.
A spokesperson for Royal Mail said: “There will be no job losses as a result of this initiative. There may be a reduction in hours, but this will focus on our use of casual workers.”
The new machinery is part of Royal Mail’s £1.8billion investment plan for the next five years across the UK.
The company is planning to increase the use of machines for sorting parcels to 80 per cent in that time - up from 12 per cent now.
Nintey per cent of all letters are already sorted by automated technology.
“The roll out of this new technology is transforming the way Royal Mail processes parcels which are continuing to grow in volumes,” said Simon Barker, national operations director of Royal Mail.
“The technology will help us to speed up the passage of parcels to local mail centres. We have worked closely with our unions throughout this programme, and colleagues who work on the machine have said they prefer the quality of work compared to manual sorting.”
How does the machine work?
The Parcel Sorting Machine (PSM) is an intelligent system of conveyor belts and scanning technology that automatically sorts parcels for despatch to mail centres across the country.
Once the machine has registered the destination address of a parcel, the item travels along the conveyor belt on the sorter until it reaches the appropriate container. At this point, the tray opens up and the parcel drops into the container ready to be taken to vehicles for despatch.
The machine is capable of sorting parcels to 81 different destinations within the Royal Mail network.
It can handle parcels the size of a CD to an items bigger than two shoe boxes side by side.
The parcel sorting technology is now operational in 12 mail centres including Bristol, Swindon, Hemel Hempstead , Chelmsford, Greenford, Warrington , South Midlands, Northampton, Jubilee, Gatwick, Birmingham , Leeds and Preston.
The Royal Mail has invested almost £4billion in its UK operations since 2013.
An earlier version of this story said there would be no compulsory redundancies at Royal Mail as a result of the installation of the new machines. This was based on a quote supplied by Royal Mail.
