In one of the world’s most high-profile and relevant RFID postal applications, AIDA Centre and Alien Technology team up to provide a complete solution for the Universal Postal Union’s (UPU) 21-member country quality efficiency program.

“The Universal Postal Union recently issued a tender to upgrade its existing RFID control technology, used to measure mail delivery efficiencies throughout their global postal network,” said Joan Pons, managing director of the AIDA Centre. “AIDA Centre designed a quality control process based on a custom postal design, covering the main UPU mail workflow requirements. AIDA Centre is pleased to have secured the integration portion of the project.

“The application involves placement of Alien UHF tags within thousands of test-delivery envelopes which are subsequently circulated throughout various post offices around the world. The tagged envelopes are then read at distinct locations and the efficiency of the postal network is then measured and quantified. The main objective being to identify potentially slow mail routes and bottlenecks to provide quality control enhancements in order to streamline the processes – so consistent tag reads are critical to the entire operation.”

“The UPU and AIDA Centre specified the most versatile and best performing RFID Gen 2 inlay in the marketplace today, as recently validated by 3rd party inlay benchmark reports such as those published by German EECC,” added Stephen Crocker, Alien EMEA sales/channels director. “Alien has been involved in several other postal applications including a major Middle Eastern project mailbox tagging application. We view the postal arena as a very progressive market and we are honored to play a key role in this high-profile application.”

“AIDA Centre conducted exhaustive comparative inlay analysis involving numerous UHF/EPC compliant Class 1 Gen 2 vendors and we quickly reached the conclusion that the Alien tags provided the best read range and most importantly, the most consistent read performance in this challenging postal environment,” Pons concluded.