- 15 min
When it comes to South Africa’s courier landscape, The Courier Guy stands out as one of the fastest-growing, most aggressive players in the market. If you haven’t received a parcel from them yet, you probably will soon, and behind that explosive growth lies a complex story of speed, scale, and intelligent automation.
SyncSystems has been solving problems for high-volume e-commerce operations, such as Takealot, Foschini Group, and Shoprite. The Courier Guy project is the next evolution of those lessons, bigger, faster, and more demanding than ever before.
This is the story of how Ignition became the backbone of a fully integrated, hyper-dynamic parcel sortation facility processing over 100,000 parcels a day.
Prefer watching instead of reading? Watch the full case study here.
A Sorting Operation Unlike Any Other
Unlike manufacturing, where products are predictable and uniform, this environment deals with the opposite: every single item is different, in terms of shape, size, weight, and fragility.
Ball bearings. Appliances. Irregular shapes. Oddly packaged items designed to push the system to its limit.
And all of it must be scanned, sized, weighed, routed, and dispatched at breakneck speed.
The numbers tell the real story:
- 100,000+ parcels/day, sorted in roughly 6 hours
- 4,000+ parcels/hour in the section highlighted
- 16,000+ data events/hour flowing through the system
- 600 unique routing destinations
- 10,000 metres of conveyor with 10,000+ motors
- Thousands of sensors, scanners, IPCs, and PLCs
- High-frequency database operations searching hundreds of thousands of entries every 500ms
This isn’t simple automation. It’s organised chaos, engineered.
From System Integrator to Turnkey Provider
In most industries, integrators handle SCADA, PLCs, and data.
In this world, the team’s role expanded far beyond that.
They deliver the entire turnkey solution:
- Mechanical design
- Installation
- Instrumentation
- High-speed conveyor control
- Warehouse Control System (WCS)
- Dimensioning/Weight/Scanning (DWS) systems
- SCADA architecture and dashboards
- Database design
- Ongoing lifecycle support
Every bolt, barcode, and byte must work together seamlessly, and most of the equipment comes from different vendors worldwide. Italy, Germany, South Africa, proprietary OEMs… all speaking different languages, all time-sensitive.
This is precisely the type of environment where Ignition thrives.
Why Ignition Was the Only Platform That Made Sense
With thousands of devices, multiple protocols, and millions of daily data points, the platform needed to be:
- Flexible
- Fast
- Integratable
- Scalable
- Affordable
According to the engineering team, doing this level of integration on traditional SCADA platforms would have been “incredibly expensive” and far less efficient.
Ignition became the central nervous system that:
- Connects Beckhoff IPCs, Siemens PLCs, and OEM systems
- Consolidates barcode, weight, dimension, routing and status data
- Hosts the tracking and traceability logic operators that rely on
- Displays live conveyor states, faults, jams, and routing decisions
- Provides mobile-first operator tools via cost-effective Android devices
- Integrates OEM SCADA screens inside Ignition for a single unified view
When you’re sorting thousands of parcels per hour, latency is money, and Ignition delivered the speed the operation needed.
A Self-Drawing SCADA? Yes, Really.
One of the project’s most notable engineering achievements was the development of a self-drawing SCADA system.
During early design phases, speed was everything. The team needed to:
- Prototype the system quickly
- Engage the customer visually
- Iterate live
- Avoid weeks of manual layout work
So they engineered a module-based system where:
- Each conveyor component (straight, curve, incline) was preconfigured
- The SCADA automatically drew the entire conveyor route based on endpoint data
- Engineers could prototype huge sections of the plant in hours, not weeks
The first time they loaded it, the project “officially broke Ignition”, in the good way.
With some optimisation (and a bigger Server), it became the secret weapon that allowed the team to deliver the entire project from April to October.
Bringing It All Together: One Screen, One Platform
Inside the facility, operators work from a single unified Ignition interface that consolidates:
Real-time conveyor control
- Motor status
- Faults
- Jams
- Sensor alignment
- Zone occupancy
Parcel tracking
- Live barcode images
- Weight & dimension snapshots
- Routing decisions
- No-read counts
- KPI dashboards
OEM system integration
Even the central sorter, controlled by an entirely different OEM, is displayed inside Ignition as a live, embedded screen.
One view.
One platform.
One source of truth.
Mobile-First Operations with a Clever Twist
Industrial environments are harsh on hardware. Screens break. Tablets get dropped. Equipment takes knocks.
The solution?
Android tablets as consumables.
To reduce cost and downtime:
- All 26 operator stations run on low-cost Android tablets
- If one breaks, a spare is plugged in instantly
- Ignition auto-loads the correct screen based on IP address
- No reconfiguration required
- No downtime
A complete mobile ecosystem, plug-and-play, designed for a harsh environment.
Handling the Data Avalanche
A system this fast generates enormous volumes of discrete data, not the classic time-series data historian.
Every parcel goes through multiple events:
- Receipt
- DWS measurement
- Sorting decision
- Dispatch
- And many micro-events in between
The system captures:
- Approx. 4 events per parcel
- 16,000 discrete database writes per hour
- Routing calculations every 500ms
- Periodic maintenance logs for thousands of motors
A pure historian wasn’t the right fit, so Microsoft SQL was used for both:
- Transaction tracking
- Lightweight historisation (stats & KPIs)
Predictive maintenance is still applied, but using daily motor-hour snapshots and service intervals, rather than continuous historization of temperatures or currents (too much data for too little value).
The Result: A Hyper-Efficient, Unified, Intelligent Facility
What The Courier Guy gets now is:
- One central operational hub
- Live tracking across thousands of parcels
- Reduced hand-handling (a primary KPI)
- Faster operator onboarding
- Higher sorting accuracy
- Unified visibility across all OEM systems
- Lower hardware costs
- Rapid troubleshooting
- Complete transparency from scan to dispatch
And most importantly, the ability to grow even further, because the platform is built to scale.
A Logistics Engine Built for the Future
The Courier Guy project is more than a SCADA system.
It’s a powerful example of what happens when:
- High-volume logistics
- World-class mechanical engineering
- Integrated control systems
- Intelligent software
- And Ignition
…all come together.
It’s fast. It’s data-driven. It’s scalable. And it’s built for the pace of modern e-commerce.