Royal Mail is using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to monitor the flow of post, to identify problem areas and improve delivery services.
Last year more than 14 million letters were lost, stolen, damaged or tampered with, and more than seven per cent of mail was not delivered on time.
The company is conducting a trial at three mail centres ahead of a possible rollout to all its 69 mail centres.
Royal Mail IS director Dominic Wilson says selected envelopes are seeded with an RFID tag and put into the system, and scanned by a reader when they reach their destinations to record the exact arrival time.
‘Previously we had no independent assessment of how we were operating, but RFID enables us to monitor the pipeline, see where the bottlenecks are and improve the efficiency of delivery,’ said Wilson.
‘It is something we have used across the European network to monitor the quality of service, but this is the first time that we have used it in the national network.’
Delivery firms UPS and TNT have tested RFID tags on shipments and returnable trays but not on individual items, citing challenges such as the development of global standards and cost of tags and readers.
Datamonitor analyst Adam Jura says RFID is used in the supply chain of logistics companies, but not postal firms.
‘Royal Mail is taking a smart approach: the use of semi-active tags provides better read rates than passive signals transmitted from a reader,’ he said.
‘It is also cheaper, as it does not send a continuous signal in the same way as active tags.’
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