By Jill Gambon

Feb. 18, 2008—Each day, postal services transport, sort and deliver millions of letters and packages to residences and businesses worldwide. Among those items are hundreds of envelopes with RFID tags tucked inside, which serve to monitor the quality of mail delivery across the globe.

Under an extensive quality-of-service monitoring project overseen by the International Post Corp. (IPC), the anonymous, RFID-tagged letters are used to track delivery times and identify any bottlenecks or problems in mail service. Launched in 1996, the program has been continuously expanded and is now one of the largest RFID deployments in the world, according to Ross Hinds, director of operations and technology for IPC, which is based in Belgium. "This has enabled enormous improvements in the quality of service," Hinds says. For instance, 95 percent of cross-border, first-class mail in Europe is now delivered within three days, up from 69 percent when the RFID monitoring project was launched.

Tags are tucked inside envelopes to monitor the quality of mail delivery across the globe.

IPC is a cooperative association of 24 postal organizations in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific, whose members handle 80 percent of the world's mail—some 330 billion letters each year. The organization is charged with improving performance of mail and parcel delivery worldwide, as well as managing the framework for payment systems between postal organizations in different countries. IPC began employing RFID technology to gauge the amount of time it takes postal operators to deliver the international mail arriving in their territory. This measure is a key component of the formula used to calculate "terminal dues" (the fees postal operators pay to each other for the delivery of cross-border mail). Under agreements reached between international postal operators, the fees are tied to stringent quality-of-service standards. As a result, millions of dollars in fees are decided by the results of the RFID monitoring.