UPU gears up for large RFID pilot

A test involving the postal systems in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates demonstrated RFID’s suitability for measuring the performance of mail delivery services.

Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates joined together in a three-month pilot earlier this year to test the suitability of employing radio frequency identification as a tool for measuring the performance of mail delivery services. The pilot, led by Qatar’s General Postal Corp. (Q-Post) and also including Saudi Post and Emirates Post, leveraged both passive EPC Gen 2 tags and active tags placed on approximately 3,120 test letters that circulated among the three nations.

The global monitoring system (GMS) will be used to provide precise diagnostic quality-of-service performance results for inbound mail. The UPU’s Quality of Service Project Group Steering Committee, of which Q-Post is a member, is spearheading the initiative.

Postal organizations in several countries have tested—and, in some cases, are currently using—RFID to track their own services. Australia Post began processing RFID-tagged test envelopes in its domestic mail service in 2005, after employing the same technology to track its international mail operations. And in an extensive quality-of-service monitoring project overseen by the International Post Corp. (IPC), RFID-tagged letters are used to track delivery times and identify any bottlenecks or problems that occur in mail service around the world. Launched in 1996, the program has been continuously expanded, and is now one of the largest RFID deployments worldwide, according to the IPC, a cooperative association of 24 postal organizations throughout Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific.

With assurances that RFID can serve as a reliable tool, Aghayan says, the postal organizations can leverage the technology to determine how well they perform. “Unless you measure and quantify, you can not improve or fix any problems that occur,” she states, adding that RFID technology can be utilized for measuring the mail pipeline in order to discover where the bottlenecks occur.

Locating and alleviating those bottlenecks will become increasingly important, Aghayan says, because the UPU has put forth new guidelines that, by 2010, will tie quality of service to the postal dues that the agency’s members pay.

In addition to the three national mail carriers, seven other organizations participated in the pilot. These included Motorola and Lyngsoe Systems, both of which provided RFID interrogators and tags, as well as Trackit Solutions, which handled installation and maintenance, and Quotas, which served as an independent third-party manager for all of the tag and testing data that was compiled.

With the RFID project involving Dubai, UAE and Saudi Arabia under its belt, the UPU is now gearing up for a large-scale GMS pilot, set to commence in April 2009, that will involve the deployment of RFID systems in Dubai, UAE and Saudi Arabia, as well as in all other participating countries (a total of 20 initially, with another 30 joining in 2010), and the development of requisite data and analysis programs. The pilot, which will involve integrated testing of the full system, is expected to launch in July 2009, and will provide an opportunity to test the various elements of the GMS system, as well as to introduce necessary adjustments in order to prepare for the 2010 rollout.