The South African Post Office (SAPO) is looking into location-based technology to speed up mail delivery processes.
This was revealed by Pierre Russouw, national automation engineer and coding expert at SAPO, speaking during the recent TomTom Africa MapCode conference in Midrand.
"We invested in equipment over the years, amounting to over R450 million, to centralise our operations and give us a higher reliance in delivering our services," said Russouw.
"Currently, we have constraints in that the equipment at our disposal is capable of doing far more than we are asking it to largely because the information contained in our existing postcode database is not efficient for sorting out details to the finest level, which is the ultimate delivery point to individual houses, blocks of flats and business environments that mail has to be delivered to. We need to modify that information system so that we can take better advantage of that equipment."
As a result, Russouw said SAPO has embarked on a project to review its postcode system that was introduced on 8 October 1973, before personal computers.
"Advancements in technology have rendered this system completely out of date. We really are overdue for modernising our systems," Russouw added.
Related to that, he said, was the challenge of geographic information which tends to be fairly static, whereas the demographics and the nature of people living in the country tends to be variable, with the urbanisation effect where people move from rural into urban areas.
"Also filter in that the post office covers more land than any other institution, with a possibility of over 12 million delivery points, every decision point is critical if we are to avoid glitches that could mean a repetition in the mailing process, a costly exercise," he said.
"The increasing number of lower, middle and high class residential developments also means an increase in the number of possible destinations, increased complexity, and, consequently, increased costs and increased possible risk of something going wrong. We have found that 80% of the process from sender to receiver was in the 'lost mail' category, an area that we needed to do more work in."
To do this, Russouw noted, SAPO had to look at a system that identifies specific types of addresses, with two standards that are referred to - the SA national standard 1883 for reversal, which is a fairly descriptive standard that provides guidelines for the allocation and maintenance of addresses in the form of a list of recommendations, for example, it is recommended that a cul-de-sac gets a separate street name if it has more than six stands.
"We also looked into the universal postal union to adopt the international addressing standards, S42, which is more prescriptive and looks at what we are required to do in terms of international requirements.
"The later standard comprises of a generic list of address elements (used in all UPU member countries) and country-specific templates that tell users how to transform address elements into an accurately formatted address, meaning that someone in China who doesn't understand the western alphabet language is able to compile something to be delivered to countries that use this system of communication."
Russouw pointed this is where SAPO will incorporate mapIT TomTom Africa's mapcode technology into its national address databases.
"The mapcode system was designed specifically as a free, brand-less, international standard for representing any location on the surface of the earth by a short, easy to recognise, remember and communicate 'code', usually consisting of between four and seven letters and digits," he said. "The short length of a mapcode is the key differentiating factor between coordinates and other codes. They are precise to a few metres, which is good enough for everyday use."
He said this will allow SAPO to identify certain aspects of the address, such as the postal delivery service routing, the post office name for a rural address, a site address that is used for an informal area, a house and building number, as well as geographic locator for both the rural an urban locations.
"This not only enables users to verify addresses before sending the mail, but also allows our postman to get in the office, pick up his bag and go deliver the mail without spending a fair amount of his time pre-sorting it," he said.
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