Q: How are all-electronic offerings increasing revenue opportunities for Posts?
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Stephen Miles MIT Auto-ID Labs
Stephen Miles is a Research Affiliate at the MIT Auto-ID Labs, the MIT Senseable City Laboratory and consultant with MIT Center for Transportation Logistics affiliate Zaragoza Logistics Center. Stephen Miles’ research interests are in leveraging automated information data capture (AIDC) and advanced wireless tracking technologies to communicate more effectively about things in shared business processes.
From my expertise in the RFID area, Chi- na Post has been tagging postbags as far back as 2005 in a project sponsored by the China 863 Program and that was featured at a Universal Postal Union Ad- vanced Electronic Services User Group (AESUG) Beijing RFID Workshop. In a re- cent webinar with Poste Italiane, that or- ganization spoke of their success in auto- mating sortation facilities using serialized bar codes and their interest in extending RFID applications to tracking postal carts in distribution centers. The next step for postal service operators will be to take the logistics information that is being captured by AIDC technologies such as bar code and RFID and to make this in- formation available to the public, both so that someone could ‘find’ their package but also to provide visibility on organiza- tion performance. Specifications for managing postal events and associated data structures, building on the ISO and Electronic Product Code Information Ser- vices (EPC-IS) standards initiated at MIT, will be required to make this information available for customers to subscribe to in
common formats around the world. If we focus on new opportunities at postal and express shipping customers, serializa- tion is the breakthrough which is allowing for unprecedented visibility and optimi- zation. Industries are adopting serializa- tion to achieve objectives ranging from regulatory compliance to quality control to product lifecycle management. Now that manufacturers are tagging prod- ucts for specific SKU’s or, as in the case of US DoD shipments, now that a signifi- cant portion of DoD bound products are tagged, the next opportunity is to ensure readers are deployed at key supply chain points to provide visibility. This is value added capability for which postal services are uniquely positioned, as many already have installed the ISO/EPCGenII RFID for UPU GMS application. As can be seen in the example of Correiros in Spain, once an architecture has been selected at the international mail gateway, similar infrastructure can be deployed across a postal service Distribution Centers to ex- tend this visibility for internal operations and for customers.
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“ Akio Miyaji Universal Postal Union
Akio Miyaji is Quality of Service Coordinator, International Bureau Universal Postal Union (UPU). He joined the UPU International Bureau as Quality of Service Coordinator in September 2005. Working in the Operations and Technology Directorate (DOT), Mr Miyaji coordinates quality improvement of international mail services and also acting as Deputy Director of the DOT. Within the International Bureau, he leads important project activities relating to the enhancement of the worldwide postal supply chain network.
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The Postal Service constitutes the larg- est supply chain for crossover trans- action of communication and small size goods across the world, where postal operators designated by 191 UPU member countries and 660,000 post offices are inter-connected. Elec- tronic offerings are the lifeline to sup- port this vast physical supply chain for its inter-connectivity and efficiency and to improve the quality of service. There are a number of requirements and opportunities for electronic offer- ings mainly in three business fields. One is the ‘tracking’: postal item and receptacle (mail bags). Second is the ‘quality’: quality measurement for all classes of postal products such as let- ters, parcels and express mail. Third is the ‘asset management: roll-palettes, commodities such as postal stamps. To a large extent ‘tracking’ and ‘quality’ go hand in hand because the ‘record of transaction time’ point by point is the key requirement. Traditionally, the bar-code ID Tag was the key media of electronic offering. However, RFID ID
Tag is becoming a complementary me- dia or even expected to be an alterna- tive media in these business fields as well and in the ‘asset management’ field, is considered as an indispens- able media. Quality with tracking is the base for trust from customers and creates business opportunities and thus revenue increase, while effective asset management creates business efficiencies and thus costs down. On a global scale, a quality measurement system called Global Monitoring Sys- tem (GMS) based on open RFID stan- dards, is now operating and various initiatives at the national scale are in- creasingly visible and expected to con- tribute to further innovation of postal services.
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