Deutsche Post (DP), the postal group of Deutsche Post DHL (DPDHL), began using EPC ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID technology this month to offer its customers—specifically, those that ship goods abroad in envelopes and small packages—a window into those shipments’ arrivals at and departures from its international sorting facility in Frankfurt. This has enabled the postal carrier to help its customers identify when packages are likely to reach their destinations in another country. DP provides status updates when its customers’ shipments arrive at facilities within 16 destination countries, which already have RFID readers and antennas installed. Other postal operators are currently in the process of installing them at the request of the International Post Corp. (IPC), a cooperative association of 24 national postal services for countries throughout Europe, Asia and North America.
DP is the largest mail services operator in Europe. It carries mail and lightweight merchandise shipments internationally, and generated €1 billion ($1.09 billion) worth of revenue last year. All of DP’s international mail shipments pass through the company’s Frankfurt sortation facility before being transported to the destination country via truck or airplane.
RFID infrastructure is not new to the postal carrier. Like other IPC members, Deutsche Post has installed UHF RFID readers at key locations, so it can more easily monitor the quality of international mail service. In addition, DP has deployed UHF readers at its international mail terminal to monitor and improve internal processes.
DP’s international hub in Frankfurt has implemented Lyngsoe Systems LS4200 RFID reader portals with integrated antennas, in order to capture the ID numbers of tags attached to the small items that pass through its sortation system.
“Beginning this year, we thought about how to commercialize what we had in place,” says Dirk Pandikow, DP’s VP of product management mail export and direct entry. The offering is known as Ländernachweis (a German word meaning “proof of country”). “In the parcel world, each parcel has a bar code to be tracked. The sender knows—via the bar-code scans—when the parcel is shipped and when it is received,” Pandikow explains, describing the process of shipping items to international destinations. “Goods shipped in mail items without registered services are completely blind between posting by the sender and arrival at the receiver’s address.”
The international movements of shipping envelopes can be even harder to track than the status of large cartons, since envelopes are small, and scanning each envelope’s bar-code label is difficult to accomplish at postal hubs. There is no standardized international bar-code system yet in place, Pandikow says. As a result, he adds, postal carriers often use a manual receiving process for incoming international mail, and sometimes re-label registered mail items from abroad. The growing volume of such small parcels that are being shipped, DP maintains, makes the need for an automated tracking system even more important.
With the new system in place, the shipper applies a DP-provided RFID label, which is then tracked automatically as the parcel passes the readers while moving into and out of the Frankfurt facility.
DP is offering two types of RFID labels intended for the envelopes’ different form factors: the N044044B1U, which has a built-in Impinj Monza 4E chip, and the AZ-9662, made with an Alien Technology Higgs 3 chip. DP sells the labels in rolls of 20 or 50, or as many as 500, which can either be manually placed on mail shipments, or be applied via a machine, in the case of a large operation. Sets of 20 cost €19 ($20.75), while volumes of 50 are priced at €45 ($49).
Customers of the Ländernachweis service would typically range from small companies that sell goods via eBay, to large firms that send hundreds of thousands of shipments internationally. The ordering of RFID labels, as well as the linking of a tag ID to a shipment, is performed via the Ländernachweis website.
After attaching an RFID label to a parcel, the shipper in Germany returns to the Ländernachweis website and inputs the unique ID number printed on the label and encoded to its RFID chip (the shipper also prints the destination on the label), thereby creating a link between the shipper and the ID. The shipper can then access that same website to view when the small parcel arrives at and leaves the Frankfurt facility, and to make that data available to its own customers awaiting those packages.
The system is presently being offered for shipments to 16 countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. At the facilities of the postal incumbents within each destination country, readers and antennas are either being installed or already installed. Depending on the destination, the letters’ tags will be interrogated once again at customs—this is the case in Switzerland and the United States—using those facilities’ own existing readers. DP expects to share shipping and receiving information with these international locations. In that way, a shipper in Germany could view a status update each time a shipment is received in that customer’s country.