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U.N.'s Universal Postal Union 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.
By Beth Bacheldor
Dec. 10, 2008—Three Middle Eastern countries—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.
Overseen by the Universal Postal Union (UPU)— a United Nations agency that serves as the primary forum for cooperation between postal organizations around the world—the pilot was designed to determine whether RFID is a viable technology for measuring quality of service as part of the agency's development of an affordable global monitoring system (GMS) covering all UPU members. The 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.
By testing whether RFID technology could perform as needed—that is, if RFID interrogators would be able to read embedded tags most of the time as the letters entered the countries' sorting centers—the postal organizations would know the technology could be deployed to collect performance metrics as mail moves through the postal system. Ultimately, the pilot proved RFID's viability as a technology for measuring the quality of postal services, according to Catina Aghayan, Q-Post's quality and development consultant. Read rates of the RFID tags, she says, averaged 95 percent to 100 percent from March 8, when the test letters began circulating, until June 8, when the pilot concluded.
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 (see Aussies Track Mail Service Via RFID). 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 (see Sealed With a Tag).
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.
Dec. 10, 2008—Three Middle Eastern countries—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.
Overseen by the Universal Postal Union (UPU)— a United Nations agency that serves as the primary forum for cooperation between postal organizations around the world—the pilot was designed to determine whether RFID is a viable technology for measuring quality of service as part of the agency's development of an affordable global monitoring system (GMS) covering all UPU members. The 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.
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| Catina Aghayan |
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 (see Aussies Track Mail Service Via RFID). 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 (see Sealed With a Tag).
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.
