Spain's Post Office Improves Delivery Speed

Correos has a workforce of 65,000 and delivers a total of 5 billion pieces of mail each year. The 5,000 RFID-tagged envelopes cycling repeatedly through the system serve as an audit for the delivery system, giving Correos visibility into the movements of letters throughout the system, as well as insight into where they might be delayed.

"Sometimes, a letter takes five or more days to reach its destination explains Martyn Mallick, director of RFID and mobile solutions for iAnywhere, "while another piece of mail [with a similar origin and destination] takes just one day."
With the RFID tracking system, Correos is gaining a better understanding of where these delays occur, and is developing strategies and retooling its systems to prevent such delays. The agency believes that doing this will improve its customer service and help it remain competitive with private delivery services.

For this application, Correos needed to install readers at up to 36 adjacent dock doors so they could read tags attached to envelopes being received. During testing, the postal service found that having that many readers operating simultaneously caused them to interfere with one another—even with the readers operating in the Gen 2 dense-reader mode, designed to reduce such interference.

To remedy the problem, Mallick says, iAnywhere and Symbol representatives worked with the Aida Centre to install movement sensors that trigger the readers only when mail is brought through a dock door, greatly reducing the number of antennas actively transmitting at any given time.

According to Mallick, Correos plans to extend its use of RFID to an asset-tracking application, and to use up to 12,000 additional Gen 2 tags to track the location of the reusable bins transporting mail throughout its system. Eventually, Correos might begin employing RFID instead of its current bar-code system to track express mail and parcels through its system, and to provide tracking information to its customers.