Symbol Technologies and its Premier Solutions Partner, Concord Unity International Limited, have been selected by China Post to supply RFID technology to track express mail bags within the postal district of Shanghai (Shanghai Post).

RFID technology has been successfully deployed in the Shanghai Post Express Mail Service (EMS) operations, and is part of an on-going national pilot project co-sponsored by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology to validate the benefits of RFID within China Post’s operations.

Symbol’s RFID technology enabled Shanghai Post to automatically track the status of mail bags en route from individual post offices to various collection and sortation centers within Shanghai. The current process of tracking the mail bags involves bar coded tags, which while reliable, does require some manual intervention.

“The primary goal of this pilot was to validate the use of RFID in terms of productivity gains leading to faster delivery services to our customers,” said Mr. Liangan Chen, vice president of Shanghai Post. “During this project we successfully proved that we can greatly improve our postal bag processing productivity over the current barcode system with nearly 100% accuracy.”

China Post has verified that RFID technology can reduce the amount of time it takes to process the mail bags, because the bags can be automatically tracked as they move through various points in their processing cycle.

“This will have significant operational improvements and cost savings for China Post when the RFID solution is implemented across all the provinces in China,” continued Chen. “Given the increased demand for Express Mail Service we are looking to deploy technologies that can improve productivity and help us meet our customer demands in the most efficient manner.”

China Post has deployed Symbol’s ruggedized and reusable RFID tags, XR400 RFID fixed readers, high-performance area antennas, and MC9000 mobile computers. Symbol’s XR400 RFID reader automates high-performance RFID tag reading and writing and is certified by EPCglobal(TM) for full Gen 2 dense- reader mode support, and provides China Post with accurate read rates in environments where multiple readers have the potential to create interference with one another.