UK Royal Mail chips in to track missing post

Royal Mail is using the new wireless tracking technology, radio frequency identification (RFID), to try to improve its lamentable record for safe delivery of post.

Last year, more than 14m letters were lost or damaged and 7 percent of mail was not delivered on time, making it increasingly difficult for the Royal Mail to sell itself as a service for businesses to use. Royal Mail plans to try to identify the “black holes” into which lost post disappears and also discover the whereabouts of the bottlenecks that clog up the system.

Until the arrival of low cost RFID chips, there has been no cost-effective technology that would allow the Royal Mail to track postage flow. But RFID uses a microchip with a unique number tag that can be scanned to identify unique items.

Selected envelopes are now being identified with RFID tags and put through the system so that they can be scanned by an RFID reader when they reach their destination to record an exact arrival time. This is far cheaper than using global position (GPS) tags, which are monitored by satellite.

Delivery firms such as UPS and TNT are reported to have tested RFID tags on shipments and on trays and cases but not on individual postage.

Royal Mail is understood to be conducting trials at several centres prior to a planned national rollout, but is refusing to comment further. “We are still completing trials and it is too soon to draw any conclusions,” said a Royal Mail spokesman.

RFID was first adopted by retailers such as Wal-Mart in the US and Marks & Spencer and Tesco in the UK to make supply chain management more efficient, ensuring that the goods and sizes appeared in stores on time. Their example was followed by drug manufacturing companies, which are using RFID to track individual medicines to protect against theft and over-production. RFID tags were originally expensive items used for the tracking and identification of high-value items such as military equipment. But the price has fallen to an extent where RFID is being used in wider applications.

Last week, the UK postal regulator Postcomm announced plans for a three-month consultation over the future of the Royal Mail. Postcomm is consulting with customers, rivals and the Royal Mail itself before publishing feedback next year. The Royal Mail lost its 350-year-old monopoly on postal deliveries at the start of 2006 and the state-owned operator is fighting private competition for business. Postcomm will meet interested parties in October to discuss how competition can be encouraged and whether the Royal Mail should be less constrained in what it can and cannot do. Most of the competitors, such as UK Mail and TNT Mail UK, collect, process and sort post but pay Royal Mail for delivery.