Fixing the billion dollar delivery address verification problem

I’ve been following Intermec for a couple of years now. They’re one of those quiet companies that you rarely hear from, generally because they’re far too busy actually delivering world class rugged mobile computing systems.

There is a temptation nowadays to assume that the best way of kitting out your team of roving engineers is to head to the Apple store and buy a job-lot of iPhones, commission an iPhone app that connects to your SAP system and boom, job done, you’re ‘mobilised’.

This might work nicely for taxi drivers or for a small team of plumbers relying on Google Mail to keep them connected. But when it comes to AIDC (“automated information and data capture”) in the field through mobile computing systems, the reality is those iPhones would each last five minutes. You only have to look at the tattered, bruised yet still fully-functional devices you scrawl your name into when the courier arrives with a package.

So if you’re looking for a decent, reliable ‘five-nines’ approach to kitting out your mobilised workforce, you should be talking to Intermec.

This week, the company announced a new addition to their service aimed at any company that collects packages for delivery. The new service is called VERDEX (i.e. ‘verify delivery’) and it solves a multi-billion dollar problem for courier and postal firms.

Here’s the issue:

A courier arrives at my office and takes delivery of my package. Typically speaking, the chap glances briefly at the address on the package and heads off. The package arrives at the sorting depot and that’s where everything generally falls to pieces. The majority of packages are fine, but some of them are wrongly addressed. Or, they’re correctly addressed — as far as we humans are concerned — but the address doesn’t actually exist in the system. For about 10 years, a good friend of mine has continually got his postcode wrong. All the time. His assumption was that as long as you put in the first bit (e.g. W10) you’d be fine.

In the States, as anyone who’s tried to trick the iTunes US Store sign-up process knows, all you need to do is put in a valid zip code and you’re fine. They don’t bother verifying anything else.

But the courier or post office is not fine: They need to actually deliver the package — a total nightmare when it’s wrongly addressed.

So when a courier doesn’t validate the delivery address on pick-up, he’s creating a huge amount of trauma for his local depot. This problem alone costs the US Postal Service a billion dollars a year.

Intermec’s solution is VERDEX. It’s a service that will plugin to any delivery system to enable delivery address verification during pick-up. Really quickly and really easily. So before the wrongly addressed package gets into the delivery system, the address is verified.

I like this approach a lot. Very elegant indeed. Especially given that when the courier scans the address and an error pops up, he can ask for clarification. It’s a heck of a lot more annoying to try and get clarification 8 hours later via the delivery depot.

You’d think this kind of thing happens routinely already but it doesn’t.

Here’s the summary from Intermec’s recent release:

“VERDEX offers mobile workers a breakthrough in mobile computing technology by empowering them to quickly and accurately extract and verify postal address information directly from their mobile computer at the point of collection,” said Larry Klimczyk, Vice President of Intermec Global Solutions at Intermec. “This capability combines the elimination of error prone manual data with never-before-seen downstream planning abilities, allowing not only increased efficiency but the accuracy enterprise-class customers require to enhance day-to-day operations.”

VERDEX works by capturing an image of text-based information such as an address or forms data, using a handheld scanner and performs a SmartMatchTM verification against a custom database of information. After verification, the image goes through a cleansing process to provide instant address verification from the point of collection. VERDEX easily integrates into existing parcel collection processes with minimal user intervention, increasing productivity and virtually eliminating all address-related errors.

I called up Allen Henley, Intermec’s Product Manager for VERDEX and asked him a few questions about the service. Here’s the audio podcast:

Thanks for taking the time to talk, Allen!

You can find out more about VERDEX at intermec.com/products/verdex.