Radio keeps tabs on the mail

Australia Post has strictly mandated delivery timetables but, until last year, the way letters and parcels passed through most of its vast network was all but invisible.

No bottlenecks: Britain and New Zealand are interested in Australia Post's mail monitoring success Picture: Andy Baker
Until the middle of 2006 the organisation relied on a manual mail monitoring system that could only reveal when a letter went into the postal network and when it popped out at its destination.
If there was a problem along the way that delayed the letter, Australia Post had no way of quickly identifying the bottleneck and rectifying the problem so it could meet a requirement that 94 per cent of standard letters be delivered on time.

To solve the problem the postal service turned to radio frequency identification (RFID), a technology it had worked with on international mail runs, Australia Post network services performance manager Alan Smith says.

"We were looking at our existing mail monitoring methodology and how that had gone over the years and, as part of our involvement in the International Post Corporation, we had worked with RFID," Smith says. "We saw the opportunity to apply that to our domestic mail services."

Early last year Australia Post decided to end its long-running mail monitoring agreement with KPMG and signed a five-year contract with RFID monitoring specialist Research International.

The agreement led to the installation of RFID equipment at national mail distribution centres, allowing Australia Post to track thousands of letters tagged with tiny radio frequency chips. Smith says Australia Post initially installed RFID readers at 53 sites and has since added another 17, including five that were brought online this month.

"We're continuing the expansion," he says. "The initial program that we put in place was to ensure that every letter processing facility in the country was equipped with RFID.

"At the beginning of the month we had five new sites come online in Victoria. Those facilities are delivery centres where we have large groups of postal workers."

Australia Post also has 2000 businesses and consumers participating in the mail monitoring program and each month the group inserts an estimated 15,000 RFID tags into letters, which are then put into the postal system to assess whether mail is delivered on time.

The RFID readers in Australia Post facilities throughout the country provide a detailed picture of how an item moves through the postal service and pinpoints a bottleneck if the item is delayed.

"Each piece of mail has the opportunity to be treated in the same way by the equipment, but every now and then you do have things like what we call a double pick-off, which is where one item is caught up with another," Smith says.

"That's going to occur for a number of reasons and with RFID we're able to run some analysis to see if there's a common machine with that problem or if there's a particular postcode with that problem."

Smith says Australia Post can identify and fix causes of delays anywhere in the postal network in two to three days, instead of the six to eight weeks it used to take.

Aside from speeding the rectification of faults, RFID has freed up Australia Post staff to focus on other tasks.

Smith says the results of the program are so impressive that overseas mail carriers, including New Zealand Post and Britain's Royal Mail are interesting in emulating aspects of the RFID network and set-up strategy.

"We installed our original sites in 100 days, covering the equivalent of 60,000km," he says.

"That has never been done by any postal administration, even in Europe, where they have a similar number of facilities but don't have to deal with the tyrannies of distance we do.

"We've had a number of administrations coming to us and asking about it.

"There has also been a lot of interest in the mail monitoring methodology we've introduced."