Asian Postal Agencies dip feet in RFID

Asian Postal Agencies( including India Post) dip feet in RFID

Postal agencies from India, Korea, Malaysia and Singapore are among mail administrations from 21 countries participating in a trial of a new service quality monitoring system based on radio frequency identification (RFID) technology.
Developed by the Universal Postal Union (UPU), the Global Monitoring System (GMS) aims to measure local posts' service quality for mail delivery.
The trial began on Aug. 5 and is expected to last till December, Akio Miyagi, UPU's quality of service coordinator, told ZDNet Asia in a phone interview. It involves 24,000 test letters sent by 530 independent testers from 38 countries. Each test letter contains a unique RFID transponder-tag, which costs US$0.30.
Stepping up postal service levels with RFID
The Universal Postal Union's trial from this month till December will involve 24,000 cards with RFID transponders affixed to them. These cards will be inserted into the test letters. According to Akio Miyagi, UPU's quality of service coordinator, each test sender is required to key into the central information system, the date and time of posting the overseas-bound test mail. Upon arrival at the destination city, the date and time will be recorded by an RFID gateway. Once the recipient receives the test letter, he or she will log in the same information into the database. "High-volume" countries would expect to receive more test letters. For example, Switzerland would be allocated 10,000 test letters, while Singapore is expected to receive 3,800. The service quality is linked to a "delivery charge or remuneration system", said Miyagi. Posts that achieve the target against their domestic standard will receive an additional bonus of 2.5 percent of their delivery charge; those that fail to meet the standard will face a maximum penalty of 2.5 percent. By end-August, UPU expects to be able to "start providing information captured in the GMS back to participating countries", said Miyagi.
Posts, he explained, have publicized domestic mail standards as well as a target for delivering upon those standards. For instance, an agency may guarantee next-day delivery for a letter posted before 4 p.m., and may commit to do this for 99 percent of all mail.
In the past, service quality was tracked manually--not only a tedious process but was also not exact and accurate enough, said Miyagi.
RFID is commonly used in industries from logistics and supply chain to retail and healthcare--to track and identify goods or even ensure the legitimacy of products.
The use of RFID to track mail, however, is also not new. According to the RFID Journal, Finland adopted the use of RFID in its postal system in 2008.
More RFID to come to Asia posts Lee Hon Chew, director of international affairs at Singapore Post, confirmed in an e-mail the organization's participation in the GMS trial is its initiation into RFID technology. There will be "some costs involved", he noted, adding that it was "too preliminary for discussion".
According to SingPost, its mail offices handle 2.8 million mail items daily, but it was unable to break the figure down to overseas and domestic items.
"This GMS trial is our first involvement in the use of RFID to measure the performance of our inbound international mail," added Lee. "After the trial, we will then evaluate the use of RFID to other aspects of the mail business."
Over at Indiapost, the agency is in the process of also tapping on RFID for domestic mail tracking and asset management. Faiz ur Rehman, Indiapost's deputy director general overseeing international relations, said in an e-mail that this project is separately supported by the UPU Quality of service fund. He was, however, unable to share more details as the project is in its early stages.
According to Rehman, the agency handles some 2,500 tons of inbound mail annually. Its delivery matrix varies depending on the location within the country, which has nine postal zones. Next-day delivery for domestic mail is limited to intra-city services. An additional day is added to overseas mail, he added, as the post requires "a day's processing at every office of exchange" before the item is transferred into the domestic stream.
For Pos Malaysia, the GMS trial will not be its first RFID project. Han Chum Choy, head of international and regulatory affairs at Pos Malaysia, told ZDNet Asia the organization has previously implemented a mail monitoring system between government departments in Putrajaya, which used passive RFID tags.
The postal agency, she added, intends to extend the use of RFID beyond the GMS trial. "Pos Malaysia plans to use RFID for part of its domestic mail service measurement," she said in an e-mail. "The initiative is still in conceptual and planning stage."
For the GMS trial, there will be 34 panelists located in five Malaysian cities, who are expected to receive some 3,800 test letters. Pos Malaysia handles an average annual inbound mail volume of 1,158 tons.