RFID gives City Link customers real-time tracking
Delivery company City Link has installed 15,000 Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags on its parcel cages to improve efficiency and speed up its delivery services. The company now plans to work with clients to provide real-time tracking solutions.
The Wi-Fi based Active RFID solution was installed by AeroScout (a US company), and JDH Consultancy at City Link’s depots around the UK. The rugged tags manage the company’s dynamic inventory of ‘roll cages’, which house and protect its high-value parcels during transit.
At any moment in time, up to 300,000 parcels in 15,000 cages at 70 UK locations can be monitored and located in real-time from City Link’s National Distribution Centre in Wednesbury, West Midlands, over the City Link Cisco Wi-Fi network.
RFID technology has been available for a long time but the cost of the tags and implementation have made its use prohibitive for tracking small, low value items. The costs are reducing and its use in logistics and item tracking is continued to increase. Marks & Spencer can track individual items and a German bookstore is using the technology within boxes of books.
While delivery companies such as City Link need to track every parcel along its journey and work out the best route for delivery of the packages within a driver’s area, the advantage of track and trace for retailers is in the added value to the customers of knowing exactly where their package is and at what time it will be delivered. RFID technology could also be used to track whether (and when) a parcel has been opened and if this has occurred before delivery.
Alec Cormack, IT Director for City Link commented: “We have a history of technology innovation, being one of the first UK carriers to utilize two dimensional barcodes on all our parcels. We are very pleased to be the first company in the express delivery market to roll out Wi-Fi-Based Active RFID tag tracking across our business.”
Cormack continued, “The implementation has already proven successful in optimizing our overnight trucking schedule and is helping us to continue to improve our delivery performance”.
“City Link is the largest Wi-Fi deployment of its kind in the world, and demonstrates both the very real need for such solutions within the logistics sector, and the scalability of the AeroScout solution,” said Andris Berzins, Managing Director, EMEA at AeroScout. “With this deployment, City Link has taken an innovative approach to improving business efficiency and cementing its position at the heart of an extremely competitive market.”
“City Link has shown great foresight in the way it plans to improve the efficiency of its delivery operations by using Wi-Fi technology,” said Richard Roberts, Director, Wireless Sales Business Development, Cisco. “The size of this implementation demonstrates that Wi-Fi location-based services are not only effective within small areas, but can also be used to improve operations across a large network of disparate sites.”
Emma Herrod
