At the IDTechEx RFID Europe event in Cambridge last week, a conversation with Motorola's RFID specialist Andy McBain threw some light on the business drivers for organisations' dabbling with RFID.
It appears that the demands of satisfying the regulator, Postcomm, is what may ultimately drive the Post Office towards RFID adoption, while in Europe, other postal organisations have already become RFID cheerleaders.
In February last year, Postcomm proposed financial penalties of £11.7m for breaches of its licence regulations in 2004/5 to protect the mail and deliver it on time. The driving role of the regulator means organisations such as the Post Office now need to know where breakdowns in the network occur, so customer service levels increase, and the Post Office doesn't incur future fines.
In fact, the postal sector offers the largest potential market for RFID by volume of tags. According to IDTechEx, the International Postal Corporation's Automatic Mail Quality Measurement (AMQM) system is the largest RFID network in the world. The IPC is a cooperative association of 23 postal operators around the world set up to develop and monitor postal services, and is using RFID for quality of service monitoring.
The Spanish Post Office, Correos, claims to have implemented Europe's largest UHF system in any sector, and is using 5000 passive RFID tags to monitor the movement of the tags in the system and log the performance of the system in real time. Some good background on the various postal services' usage of RFID can be found on this IDTechEx brief by Raghu Das.
For now, the Post Office has embraced mobile technology more than RFID, simply to ensure that the audit trail for package delivery is more immediate. (Sign for a package at your door these days, and it's more likely to be with a stylus on a handheld device than a pen on a ragged piece of paper)
But you can expect the Post Office to perhaps follow Correos' example in detecting bottlenecks or delays in the mail supply chain. And ultimately help keep the regulator sweet!