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L.N. Revathy

Use and abandon'! That's typically the attitude of the traveller towards the trolleys he uses at airports to tow his luggage.

But logistics companies, looking to deliver with minimum fuss and effort, cannot take trolleys for granted.

Take the Finnish Logistics Company - Finland Post, for instance. The company delivers close to 25 million parcels annually apart from spanning 7,000 daily delivery routes and 2.5 million delivery addresses.

To ensure timely and effective delivery, the company relied on more than 200,000 trolleys, which were used to distribute mail between sites, within distribution depots and on delivery lorries and other means of transport. The costs were high, but the trolleys were the backbone of the distribution system.

Finland Post had no means of accurately monitoring and managing these re-usable trolleys or roll cages as they are called. They kept disappearing, forcing the company to invest repeatedly in procuring new ones.

The problem was particularly acute during the festive season.The company decided to track the roll cages to maximise supply chain efficiency. It examined several technology solutions before settling for BEA RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) solution. The pilot proved that RFID could be used to track the roll cages in the supply chain.

Working closely with Cap Gemini and BEA consultants, Finland Post identified and designed the appropriate RFID technology in the BEA WebLogic Platform.

The eight-week pilot involved 30 customers and 200 roll carts. Operators and local delivery drivers used mobile data collection terminals to scan RFID tags and track the trolley deliveries and collections across operations.

The pilot allowed Finland Post to charge customers for their use of roll carts besides generating analytic information such as asset cycle time, dwell times, utilisation rate and shrinkage points.

The pilot is complete, and Finland Post is all set to implement RFID throughout Finland in every terminal of the company and on all kinds of containers.

India Post has more volumes than Finland Post, obviously.

lnr@thehindu.co.in

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