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- The service is leveraging millions of Wiliot’s Bluetooth-based Ambient IoT tags on roll cages that contain mail and parcels, as they are loaded into, and back out of vehicles
- The system enables the postal service to improve efficiency, improve truck capacity rates and thereby reduce costs and carbon footprint
Five hundred years after King Henry VIII launched the UK’s Royal Mail national postal service, the historic organization has gone through a major technology upgrade.
The agency has rolled out Wiliot’s Ambient IoT technology to track its roll cages used for parcel and mail transportation between its sites, prior to delivery. The agency uses Ambient IoT Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) readers in vehicles, and three Wiliot IoT Pixel tags on each of the rolling containers, (known as yorks).
Additionally, the postal service is deploying readers at some of its sortation sites. Wiliot’s cloud-based software provides the read data to a digital control towner application which runs on the Google Cloud Platform for real-time alerting as well as analytics.
Since the system went live this fall, Royal Mail has reported a boost in its efficiency by knowing where its fleet of over 850,000 rolling cages are in real time. The solution enables the service to better understand capacity utilization of its approximately 6,500 large vehicle fleet that carry the yorks filled with parcels.
A Transport System Reliant on Rolling Cages
In fact, the system accomplishes that “all without the cost and compliance issues associated with manual scanning,” with barcode scanners said Nathan Preston, Royal Mail’s tech director for strategy, innovation, and data.
The post’s mail collection and delivery program serves 32 million U.K. residential and commercial addresses, from remote Scottish islands to the suburbs of London. One of the existing challenges for the mail operation is ensuring there are enough yorks to transit parcels between distribution sites and post offices.
The life cycle of these yorks needs to be tracked as they travel between the sites. Some of the rolling cages are provided to customers based on the number of items they plan to ship, and local sites use a manual process to ensure customers have the rolling containers they need onsite.
Tracking Assets in Large Vehicles
To properly serve its audience, Preston said, the postal service has been looking toward technology. “We must manage the cost of meeting [our] obligation as efficiently as possible,” Preston said. That means knowing where its fleet of rolling cages are in real time and link that to the details about what is loaded in each vehicle.
With that data, he said, “we can reduce delays, while also reducing operational expenditure. That’s an advantage that any business would appreciate.”
The solution consists of Wiliot’s passive IoT Pixel tags (similar to stickers) attached to each rolling cage, and gateway readers in vehicles, Each truck is being equipped with between two and six Bluetooth Bridges that energize and read the tags on the cages inside the vehicle. Some vehicles have two decks, each containing rolling cages. For these the installation team attached six bridge devices, the smaller vehicles have just two.
“The data from these devices is routed over a cellular telematics gateway to the Wiliot Ambient Data Platform, which then passes the data, fully encrypted to our systems, and the digital control tower we have developed,” said Preston. Readers come with GPS as well as Bluetooth technology to transmit each rolling cage’s data with the GPS location in real time to the Ambient IoT software.
As parcels travel between 37 mail centers, two automated parcel hubs and 1,200 delivery offices via a network of vehicles, the tags enable a live digital map of their movement.
The technology works without any interaction by the employees. As they load or unload the roll cages into the vehicles, the location data is automatically updated, including at customer sites.
Managing the Rolling Cage Data
The Wiliot Ambient Data Platform distills the stream of data coming from the tags on the rolling cages to business events. “Our systems correlate the data and notify us when a particular rolling cage has been loaded into a truck or unloaded at its destination. Our digital control tower and enterprise applications use this to build a digital picture of our network,” Preston explained.
Wiliot’s partner ERM provided the reading devices—a total of 20,000— intended for the harsh environment they would be exposed to, explained Steve Statler, Wiliot’s chief marketing officer.
The data provides analytics to help “right-size” the trucks so that their size is matched to typical loading, said Statler. Mail must be delivered on time so that trucks leave on a fixed schedule, even if not entirely full.
Gaining Analytics to Improve Load Efficiency
The collected data allows Royal Mail to evaluate the right size of each transportation route, and where smaller vehicles that use less fuel can be deployed.
The technology will also be driving the workflow, Statler explained, to make sure receiving sites have the right workers ready for the right delivery, at the right place and time.
Therefore, the system provides benefits related to reducing manual labor cost, boosts efficiency and helps prevent errors as well as loss of assets.
Future of Parcel Tracking
In the future, Royal Mail plans to use the digital tags on individual parcels. Additionally, it has started putting reading infrastructure in its larger facilities which will give them real time location data about where those cages are and see them moving around without requiring scanning or choke points.
Wiliot’s sticker-like tags also include sensor functionality to monitor data such as temperature and humidity. Royal Mail plans to offer temperature sensing to its customers in the future.
The system is intended to help the agency meet universal service obligations (USO) by ensuring each vehicle departs on time to ensure delivery as scheduled.
When it comes to the analytics data, the solution benefits a wide variety of companies tracking mobile goods and assets. “Once you start to understand those patterns and behaviors, you are able to establish what needs to change to meet business objectives and targets,” Statler explained. Royal Mail can do so, while delivering its service in a more sustainable manner.
By tracking the assets that transport inventory (parcels in the case of Royal Mail) Wiliot offers what Statler calls “the missing link to have that live visibility of the item,” which could be the asset or the goods loaded into that asset.
Finding Spare Capacity
Since the technology was deployed, said Preston, “it’s been a pleasant surprise to discover where there is spare capacity in our fleet of assets. We can be more lean, without impacting service quality. Now we can start to do what the airline and hotel industries have been doing for years: managing yield by right-sizing our trucks so we save money and reduce the environmental impact.”
The data has produced other surprises as well. “While we have been laser focused on quality of service and cost reduction in this first phase, we were surprised when we saw thousands of Wiliot IoT Pixels appear in one of our vehicles,” Preston said, when watching the movement of roll cages in the software.
“Initially we thought it was an error. Then we realized that one of our team had shipped a reel of these tags in the mail. This got picked up, just as the tags on parcels will in the future. This was an early unexpected signal that increased our confidence that the tracking of parcels with these postage-stamp sized computers is possible,” he added.
In the future, Preston said “the insight gained drives further analytics and workflows for our management, planners and staff on the ground that allow us to analyze what’s happening and optimize the network. Next year this same data and logic will be exposed to customers—increasing the modernization of our services.”
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