In this interview, IoT Business News speaks with Eric Casavant, Director of Product Marketing at Wiliot, about the company’s collaboration with Royal Mail. The discussion covers the phased deployment of Wiliot’s ambient IoT technology across Royal Mail’s logistics network, including the tagging of rolling containers, the challenges of scaling across a national infrastructure, and the results from this ongoing initiative.
IoT Business News: Can you please share a brief description of the deployment conducted by Wiliot and Royal Mail?
Eric Casavant: The partnership is a three-phase effort, undertaken by Royal Mail and Wiliot to digitize vehicles, facilities, and delivery networks. Royal Mail began by tagging roughly 900,000 of its wheeled containers, known as Yorks, with Wiliot’s Ambient IoT Pixels. All packages and parcels are moved by Yorks, which were regularly being lost and unavailable when needed. This made tracking the Yorks critical to improving parcel handling time and efficiency. The Ambient IoT Pixels transmit live data on location as the Yorks travel around the country, providing Royal Mail with insights into the journey of their cages and the parcels on those cages. Royal Mail has commenced phase two of the effort, which gives visibility into its numerous facilities, in preparation for phase three – visibility at the individual parcel level.
Why was Wiliot’s ambient IoT technology chosen by Royal Mail for this project?
Wiliot’s technology is scalable, automatic, and low-power, allowing Royal Mail to adapt the technology to their delivery network’s needs. The company’s battery-free tags require no maintenance and can stay functional in the wide range of environments that Yorks are exposed to. Wiliot’s technology and supporting infrastructure is also not cost-prohibitive, allowing Royal Mail to add visibility to a number of critical locations that Yorks go, and track inventory and shipments at a larger scale than ever before.
How does Wiliot’s ambient IoT technology work?
Ambient IoT is an evolution of the traditional Internet of Things, and aims to extend IoT intelligence to every single thing – down to parcels, packages, and reusable crates. Ambient IoT is an energy harvesting 3GPP IoT that powers itself through radio waves, and ambient IoT tags are significantly smaller than previous generations.
Wiliot’s IoT Pixels are battery-free, powered by radio waves, and about the size of a postage stamp. IoT Pixels communicate constantly without human intervention over industry-standard, ubiquitous Bluetooth, and empower every product, object, and ‘thing’, to sense inefficiencies and problems it encounters by continuously monitoring conditions throughout transportation, supply chains, and even in stores.
How large was the project, and how did Royal Mail determine which assets to tag first?
The project is quite large; Royal Mail is the United Kingdom’s oldest postal service and handles more than one billion parcels annually. Royal Mail opted to deploy Wiliot’s ambient IoT technology in three phases, beginning with their York rolling cages and Royal Mail delivery trucks, then moving into Royal Mail facilities, and eventually adding Ambient IoT Pixels to every parcel for parcel-level visibility. The company began with the York rolling cages because of the high value of these cages – a new rolling cage costs Royal Mail about $260 USD, and when tagging the Yorks, Royal Mail discovered that 10% had been previously unaccounted for in their inventory.
Were there any challenges faced by the Wiliot and Royal Mail teams when undertaking this project?
The most significant challenge faced is simply the enormous size of Royal Mail’s delivery network. The company has about 1,000 sites, and thousands of vehicles that handle more than one billion parcels a year. Wiliot worked with Royal Mail to ensure that the entire delivery network was digitized, creating a live digital map of product journeys, and because Wiliot runs on Bluetooth and easily source-able devices, staying flexible when deploying proved straightforward.
Have there been any significant results from the project that have stood out?
Even in the early stages of the project, Royal Mail has already seen notable results. By gaining visibility into its fleet of rolling cages, Royal Mail has been able to both optimize the distribution of cages across nearly 5,000 locations and enterprise customers, and reduce the number of missing cages. Additionally, Royal Mail has been able to better utilize its vehicles. With increased visibility, Royal Mail has been able to see how much is being loaded into its fleet of trucks. This allows the company to track which delivery trucks may be underutilized and optimize routes accordingly.
What are the companies’ plans for the next stage of this partnership?
For the next stage of the partnership, Wiliot and Royal Mail are continuing the company’s modernization by extending visibility into a number of facilities, preparing for visibility of individual packages in the future. When parcels are digitized, customers will be able to track their packages’ location in real time, and Royal Mail will be able to significantly cut missing parcels, delayed fulfillment, and provide the most predictable ETA and route times in the market.
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