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SingPost studying smart stamps and letterboxes to cope with sharp rise in package deliveries

SINGAPORE — Sometime in the future, Singaporeans might be collecting their mail from “smart” letterboxes that will alert them whenever they have mail to collect, and which can dispense the mail after a quick scan of an EZ-Link card or QR code.

A SingPost worker demonstrating how the smart letterbox system works.

A SingPost worker demonstrating how the smart letterbox system works.

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SINGAPORE — Sometime in the future, Singaporeans might be collecting their mail from “smart” letterboxes that will alert them whenever they have mail to collect, and which can dispense the mail after a quick scan of an ez-link card or Quick Response (QR) code. 

On Tuesday (Sept 24), Singapore Post (SingPost) showed reporters a prototype of one such smart letterbox system and demonstrated how it works.

The letterbox can also sort out mail for households in an apartment block. Postal workers would be able to drop off the mail for all the residents in that block into a centralised collection panel, and the letterbox will then automatically sort and allocate the mail for each household before alerting the residents who have received mail.

This and other innovations will be the way of mail delivery in the future as SingPost strives to address some of the challenges that it faces today due to the sharp rise in e-commerce deliveries, chief executive officer Vincent Phang said.

This is a challenge that is only going to get bigger, as e-commerce volumes are expected to triple in the next six to seven years, he noted. 

Right now, SingPost delivers an average of about three million items every day. However, its infrastructure is optimised for the delivery of letters and packets rather than large parcels, Mr Phang said. 

Moreover, he noted that customer expectations for e-commerce deliveries are different compared to regular letters and packets. For these deliveries, customers usually expect to be notified of the movement of their items and when they get delivered.

SingPost has come under public scrutiny in the past few years for service lapses as it struggled to cope with these challenges. 

It was fined a total of S$400,000 by the Infocomm Media Development Authority in 2017 and 2018 for failing to meet delivery standards. In 2017, a SingPost mailman was arrested after being caught discarding mail into a dustbin without delivering them. 

As he unveiled the technological innovations that SingPost is studying to improve its operations, Mr Phang said: “This is what we (are offering) as a vision of the future… it is meant to stimulate discussion among us... on what could well be the future of our postal service. We see this as opening up all possibilities. It is only limited by our imagination.”

STILL JUST A CONCEPT

However, there are no plans yet to roll out the smart letterboxes to neighbourhoods across Singapore. 

“This is just a concept. So if anything, it is just a demonstration of what we believe will be the way forward (for SingPost),” Mr Phang said.

The company is still “not quite sure” what the final product, if it were to be introduced, will look like.

He added that SingPost is in talks with various stakeholders in Singapore, including customers, regulators and the authorities, on how the letterbox can be designed to best tackle the challenges that confront the postal service.  

Another innovation that SingPost believes will come into common usage someday is the smart stamp, which can allow a parcel to be easily tracked throughout its delivery journey. Photo: Raj Nadarajan/TODAY

Mr Phang also said that SingPost will take into consideration various concerns when coming up with the final product, such as the capacity of the letterboxes and whether they will be accessible to certain groups such as older residents who may not be as tech-savvy.

“A lot more work obviously has to be done to understand (the) different precincts… and estates as well as the buying behaviour (and) delivery patterns. All that data is something that we have, and that will go into how we can customise (the letterboxes) for (the) roll-out and implementation,” he said.

SingPost also plans to engage various parts of the community during its development efforts to work towards an “ergonomic design” that can benefit all Singaporeans, he added.

When asked how much it would cost to build a unit similar to the prototype that was unveiled, Mr Phang declined to comment.

SMART STAMPS

Another innovation that SingPost believes will come into common usage someday is the smart stamp, which can allow a parcel to be easily tracked throughout its delivery journey.

With the smart stamps, every single item that comes through SingPost would be assigned a unique identifier and customers would receive notifications on the estimated time of arrival of their mail, whether any mailing issues arise while in transit, and when the letters, packets and parcels have been delivered.

As it is now, the majority of the items that are delivered by SingPost are not tracked.

When their items arrive at the smart letterbox, customers can then either use their ez-link card or scan a QR code using their mobile phones to collect their mail. 

Related topics

SingPost smart stamps smart letterbox postal service

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