Parcel & Pipeline Visibility Project
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Whether you're in Delivery, Processing, Fleet, or International, we’re all seeing the increase in parcels in our network.
This is only going to keep going up, with a potential rise of over 30% by 2027.
Our current ways of working are not designed for these volumes. If we’re going to keep up with what our customers want from us, we can’t just work harder - we need to work smarter.
This is why we’re excited to be the first postal company in the world to be introducing a new ground-breaking technology into the pipeline – smart tags.
What are smart tags?
These tags look like small stickers but are actually tiny computers.
These computers are automatically scanned by nearby Bluetooth devices, called Readers (also known as Bridges), and continuously report on things like their location, temperature and humidity.
Not only do the smart tags automatically share this information with Readers, but they also update and charge themselves on Bluetooth signals, meaning the software continues to be upgraded and they don’t run out of battery.
How can we use this technology?
The immediate goal with these smart tags is to use them to track items through the network, such as yorks and parcels.
In the long term, with the use of the temperature and humidity monitoring features, we could use them to safely transport specialist products through the network, such as food and medicine.
What are the benefits?
The information from these smart tags will allow us, in one click, to create a digital map of the network, showing where every york and parcel is within the pipeline at any given moment. The benefits of this to us and our customers are revolutionary.
Benefits for our colleagues and Royal Mail
- Real-time data on yorks' locations, so we can quickly relocate unused ones to where they’re needed.
- Incoming reports to units, letting them know the quantity and destinations of parcels on their way to their office, allowing managers to better plan workloads.
- Mis-sorts alerts letting us know when a parcel is in the wrong york, or a york is in the wrong vehicle, allowing us to quickly mitigate potential delays.
- More visibility and accuracy, reducing frustration caused for our colleagues by missing equipment or missorted parcels
- New roles and learning opportunities for our colleagues in data and operational planning.
- A view on hidden inefficiencies in our network, such as seeing where bottlenecks may be occurring.
- A better understanding of inefficiencies within our fleet, such as using large vehicles on low-volume routes. By making sure we have the right vehicles for the right routes, we can also reduce our carbon emissions.
- Improved network and quality means more customers, supporting Royal Mail to grow. More growth means more opportunities to invest in our people.
Benefits for our customers
- Will enable real-time tracking and alerts, allowing customers to have accurate, up-to-date information on where their parcels are
- Mis-sort alerts mean fewer parcels getting lost or delayed
- Improved efficiency across the pipeline increasing our quality of service
- Proactive alerts for loss of control events, such as traffic or extreme weather, so we can let our customers know straight away that there is going to be a delay to their delivery.
What’s next
There is so much potential with this technology but we’re starting with tracking yorks. So far we have tagged 890,000 yorks with smart tags and installed Readers into our buildings and fleet. Because of this, we can already see in real-time where each and every one of them is around the country.
Our next steps are to rollout a process called containerisation, in which we can assign parcels to tagged yorks and therefore start tracking parcels as they move through the network in our yorks. The process is currently being rolled our across all of Processing.