RFID helps UK Courier Company
Submitted by jeffrey on Thu, 2007-03-29 13:22.
Tags: Courier | logistics
City Link is a leading express delivery courier company in United Kingdom. It delivers a variety of packages across the country. Its delivery model relies heavily on road transport. City Link uses more then 15,000 containers to collect/distribute the shipments from its collection to its distribution center and finally to its client. It also uses these containers to pick up shipment from customer’s location.
Managing this huge number of containers (which look more like cages with rollers) is a challenging task. High number of workers is needed to perform various managerial tasks. In spite of this huge workforce, delays in pickup and shipment happen quiet a few number of times. The primary reason being the exact location of these 15,000 containers is never known. Hence, 70 collection and distribution centers have to often guesstimate the exact location. This often results in them being waiting for the container to arrive. Plus, customers cannot be intimated in advance of a delayed pick up or delivery. Customer satisfaction hence gets highly effected.
To effective track the movement of this huge number of delivery containers, City Link adopted the RFID technology. Each container was tagged with an active 2.4 GHz RFID tag. These specially designed tags have a life of about 8 years. IEE 802.11 interface protocol was chosen for communication between the readers and the active tags. The implementation used 180 Wi-Fi access points to read the RFID tags.
The new system has proved to be a boon to the company. It now gets accurate information on the location of each cage. Hence, various depots can plan delivery well in advance. Also they don’t have to keep buffer cages because they now know when they would receive the cages. This centralized data collection has reduced delays in collection of packages from client and delivering the same to destinations.
City Link management is impressed with this implementation and is now planning to increase usage of RFID based asset tracking. It toyed with the idea of tagging individual parcels but found it an expensive idea. Using RFID is now part of new business expansion plans.
Technorati Tags: Courier# logistics# #
Tags: Courier | logistics
City Link
City Link is a leading express delivery courier company in United Kingdom. It delivers a variety of packages across the country. Its delivery model relies heavily on road transport. City Link uses more then 15,000 containers to collect/distribute the shipments from its collection to its distribution center and finally to its client. It also uses these containers to pick up shipment from customer’s location.
The problem
Managing this huge number of containers (which look more like cages with rollers) is a challenging task. High number of workers is needed to perform various managerial tasks. In spite of this huge workforce, delays in pickup and shipment happen quiet a few number of times. The primary reason being the exact location of these 15,000 containers is never known. Hence, 70 collection and distribution centers have to often guesstimate the exact location. This often results in them being waiting for the container to arrive. Plus, customers cannot be intimated in advance of a delayed pick up or delivery. Customer satisfaction hence gets highly effected.
The solution
To effective track the movement of this huge number of delivery containers, City Link adopted the RFID technology. Each container was tagged with an active 2.4 GHz RFID tag. These specially designed tags have a life of about 8 years. IEE 802.11 interface protocol was chosen for communication between the readers and the active tags. The implementation used 180 Wi-Fi access points to read the RFID tags.
Advantages of the new system
The new system has proved to be a boon to the company. It now gets accurate information on the location of each cage. Hence, various depots can plan delivery well in advance. Also they don’t have to keep buffer cages because they now know when they would receive the cages. This centralized data collection has reduced delays in collection of packages from client and delivering the same to destinations.
Further development
City Link management is impressed with this implementation and is now planning to increase usage of RFID based asset tracking. It toyed with the idea of tagging individual parcels but found it an expensive idea. Using RFID is now part of new business expansion plans.
City Link is an ideal example of a successful RFID implementation in the logistics industry.
Technorati Tags: Courier# logistics# #