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Welcome to the Mr. Beacon podcast. We've got a really special episode this week. We've spent hundreds of episodes looking at the components of IoT and Ambia IoT. But this time, we're going to look at how the whole thing comes together. I'm doing this podcast with Knitten Cambodge, who is the head of strategy for digital supply chain at Royal Mail.
This is an organization that is 500 years old that has deployed a bunch of really interesting technologies. But for them, it has to work because when it doesn't work, people get upset. It has an impact on all of the businesses, all of the people in the United Kingdom. So the stakes are high and they've done an amazing job. What I'm so impressed about with what Royal Mail has done is the way they've sequenced the project, the design of the solution.
And I hope you get that from my conversation with Knitten. So enjoy. The Mr. Beacon Ambient IoT podcast is sponsored by Williot, bringing intelligence to every single thing. So Knitten, welcome to the Mr. Beacon podcast. Thank you, Dave. Thank you for having me. Well, I am super excited. We cover a lot of different technologies on the podcast. It's sponsored by Williot, but I make a point of trying to include alternative technologies, competitive technologies.
So this week we're going to focus on Ambient IoT and Williot's technology because you work for Royal Mail and we've just announced your together, the deployment of Williot's technology across the whole of the Royal Mail post and parcel network in the United Kingdom. You architected the solution, you working with an amazing team, developed it and deployed it. And in my opinion, this is a really historic use of this technology that I think will change the way businesses operate in the future.
And it's wonderful to see Royal Mail as an institution that is approximately 500 years old, started off in the first customer was Henry VIII. The first technical innovation was the postage stamp, the famous penny black. I mean, that's pretty innovative. And now Royal Mail has deployed roughly 2.5 million Williot IoT pixels across its network. So I want to talk to you about that and really understand it at all the levels that I think makes sense and are interesting.
What is it that you have done at Royal Mail? Was Royal Mail using Ambient IoT 4? Why? What are the business needs and the benefits and how? Let's get into what it took, what's the design of the solution, what are the alternatives that you looked at and how did you develop it. Maybe in summary, you're tagging these rolling cages, right? And you call them Yorks. You call them Yorks? Why do you call them Yorks?
I'm not sure how much it is correct, but I'm lucky to believe that they were first used in that facility. And when they started to pop over in other parts of our network, somebody would ask you what's that and they started calling that Yorks. That's how the name has continued and it's still there. It has been called Yorks. These are metal cages. They're on wheels. They're 5 or 6 feet high, something like that. They basically carry the letters and the parcels around the network.
All of our network movements within our network happens on these containers. Let us, as you said, they go in plastic trays, those trays go end up being in these containers as well as the parcels. And effectively, any movement within our network, we use them to transport the items from one place to another, including our customer sites. We do operate other ways like pallets, loose load, but this is the main integral part of how we move items within our network.
So these Yorks rolling cages, in my mind, they're like the white blood cells that carry the oxygen around the body of the United Kingdom postal network. In this case, it's not oxygen, it's letters and parcels. These things are full of letters and parcels. And then you're tracking them. How do you track them using Wiliot technology? There's an interesting history around it. We have been looking at solutions in this space. What we ended up with is a Wiliot tracking solution.
And what we have done is deployed the Wiliot smart tags onto these containers as made of digital association between them. And then effectively, we have ambient IoT reader devices currently to begin with in our vehicles. So when these containers with pixel tags, when they're loaded onto our vehicles, they move around within our network, RMG and customer sites, we get a snail trail of their movement across all of them, not just one or two, thousands of sites.
We have thousands of containers. We have already tagged more than 800,000 containers. And each one has got a unique ID, right? It's got an ass ID that's being tracked. Why is it important to know where they are? Because that's fundamentally what the system does. So as it's thousands of sites, 800,000 containers, they eventually go from a place from customer. You get the container with full of items, by the letters of parcel.
It goes through our supply chain, goes to our final mile sites and items get delivered. But then you need to loop that back to the upstream into the supply chain so that the flow continues. Because if it's all one way, you would just send into everything in the final mile. Your customers don't have enough containers to ship. Your middle mile sites don't have enough to move the items around.
So there's a continuous evolving life cycle that we need to maintain of these containers to bring them upstream to the sites. And that's where it becomes critical, even more so critical during the autumn pressure around Christmas, where we see a spike in volumes of parcels and letters go through our network. And what we essentially want is more efficiently we can manage within our operations with the same type of containers.
So if you don't have the rolling cages where they need to be, then basically the mail stops. You have nothing to put the letters and parcels in. So it's really important that they are distributed and available so that they're not delays. Absolutely. It compromises everything. It compromises our customer service. It compromises our mental mile and it compromises kind of the lock champ that we might have in our final mile.
So maintaining that balance across all sites, continuous movement or repatriation is essential to running a smooth business. Because if you can't supply to our customers, they can't ship the items. The end user is impacted and the customer would say, role may this not able to meet the service. So at the heart of it is the universal service obligation that role mail has to follow has to meet.
And that makes, you could say, one price goes anywhere and those kind of essential service promises that we have made under the USL. When everything is moving within those containers, you need to make sure that the heart of those things is working like a clockwork. So that it never stops because a small interruption could cause hours and hours of disruption. Or we might exponentially increase our cost because we might find other ways to continue to maintain our quality.
Okay. Yeah. So when you have to mitigate a shortage, then there's delays, but there's also extra cost in doing that. You talked about having the containers upstream and downstream. So what does that mean? What is upstream in this context? So customers. So we are essentially, if you talk about the end to end supply chain, it starts from manufacturing to the delivery at the doorstep.
We are at the final end of it when a customer or our customers customer effectively places an order online for an item to be delivered to their home address. That's the role that we play in. That being just the items from these large wholesale retail, you could say customers of hours who basically give the item or the trust's role mail to deliver it on time with the promises that we have given to our customers and our customers have given to the end users essentially.
And that's where I think it's essential to maintain that life cycle that the parcel journey ends from receiving it from customer down to the doorstep. But the things that we used to move that item, which is our containers, they still need to go back so that the next cycle of items could go through. So this is where it's a cyclic loop that we need to continue and maintain across thousands of customer sites and thousands of wrongless sites.
So an example customer might be some kind of retailer who wants to ship product to their customers and you would give them some rolling cages. Just enough that they basically they have what they need to put the packages in. How do you how did you know how many they needed before and and what does putting all of these online with ambia IOT due to change that.
The contract has a level of understanding about how much items we expect from these customers to be shipped into our network. We try and translate that into our container profile that to ship X number of parcels, how many containers they would need.
And what we try to do is our local sites, which are point connections for the customer collection sites as well. They are in constant touch of are you need of more containers or customers reach out to say that they have a spike in volume and they have limited containers. So for the next shipments across the day week, they might need more. It's a very manual process at the moment. There's no proper record of it or I should say before implemented the ambia entirety.
There's phone calls involved. There's our emails involved and there are people who just are looking to fulfill those requests on an ongoing basis. So that's the nature of before ambia entirety.
So what we want to do or the aim is that we want to try and as much as automates automate orchestrate that process that there are less emails, there are less phone calls and there's sufficient amount of containers at all places because what we don't want to do is either over supply because over supply means that some other part of the operation would get compromised or under supply a customer because then the service to them would get compromised.
So it's finding the right balance. Yes. And when you talk about the fact that yeah, if you give customer a too many rolling cages, then then there may be customer B doesn't get enough. Then you start to realize, oh my goodness, this can potentially be super complicated and it makes sense for it to put it online. Now you mentioned that you've tagged over 800,000 of these rolling cages and you're finding more.
And the reading is done in the vehicles that move these around. How many vehicles do you have and for people not familiar with them, you know, how big of these things? So we're talking about approximately anywhere between 67,000 vehicles. These are large trucks ranging from seven and a half ton size vehicles to a long trailer that could carry up to 100 of these containers that we are talking about and thousands of parcels.
So they are operate across the entire of the UK geography. The deployment has been very, I would say, an interesting challenge because how do you deploy near equipment on the vehicles, which are also performing operational duty.
And from that perspective, it's the larger fleet that we have currently started with. But in terms of that extension of that ambient priority environment, when it goes down to a parcel level, we might want to extend it to a good 50,000 strong fleet that includes the final mile van.
Okay, so you have the raw male vans, beautiful red vehicles that take the packages on the last part of the journey to people's homes. And that would be kind of the next step. But to be clear today, it's Bluetooth readers in these massive multi-tun vehicles and thousands of those that are already deployed. And what are the readers that you're using just out of interest? So we walked collectively with William, one of the manufacturers called ERM. ERM, okay.
And we 12 up to B spoke device, not in terms of technology B spoke, but B spoke for an automotive environment, because we wanted something that can last the harsh weather of, you could say, being exposed to snow. No rain, because some of the times these vehicles, they are open. So the rain, the moisture, can it last over there, the vibrations that you get caused by the vehicle moving. So it developed that B spoke to wise and voltage spikes, voltage spikes, current spikes.
Yeah, it just as tougher an operational environment that you can experience, yeah, completely different to any equipment that you would deploy inside a building. So it just need to line into those harsh environments.
So this is where ERM, who have a good experience in telematics type of devices. So they brought in their expertise around developing equipment for the vehicles, they worked with will, to have the technology expertise and obviously role mail from our perspective, we provide the design needs or considerations. The temperature range in UK could go very extreme. We have historical temperature extremes of, you could say minus 20 degrees in some places or the extreme highs of 40 degrees.
But that's just the atmospheric environment. So what about the environment within these last trucks, because they have somewhat like a solar cooker or kind of a, you're putting it in another one exactly. So the 40 degrees outside could easily translate into 50, 55 degree inside a vehicle because of that chamber. Centigrade, we're talking about absolutely centigrade.
And so we wanted a device that would last. Yes. And also perform within that environment. And we wanted a fit and forget device. Right. We didn't want it to go back again and again, manage it, fix it. We wanted it fixed once and all the work in a proper IoT world could be done all remotely. So that's the aspiration. We are good long way. We have done majority of our deployment. It's still in progress. As the scale would always demand or have challenges associated around it. Right.
So how many of these ERM Bluetooth ambient IoT Bluetooth readers are there in each of these trucks? So in total, we are looking at 20 or 1000 devices across that large fleet. We had to go categorically in terms of design the requirements for each of the vehicle type. So the smaller vehicles can manage with two. I'd they could have managed with one, but you always build some sort of a fail safe. Yeah. Like how you do a Wi-Fi in a building. Right.
You don't have just one Wi-Fi access point. You have a some sort of a fail fallback device nearby. So that's where we went with the smaller vehicles with two. The larger trucks. The ones which are single deck. We went with three devices because the lens could go. Anywhere between 10 to 15 meters. The length of the trailer. And then we have something very unique. I'm not sure I'm seeing much that elsewhere. What we call as a double deck trailer. It's like a double deck bus. Yeah.
Where you have a stack of containers that would go on a load. And then an equal or equal proportion stack of containers that would go on the upper deck. And we have a lift mechanism that you load the upper deck. It gets lifted up and then you load load. And in that scenario, we had to go with six devices. Okay. Because three on each level. Three on each levels. Same length. Approximately between anywhere that around 10 to 15 meters.
Wearing because of the different specs we have bought over time. Yeah. And just sort of operationally. The thing that I think is really important is that you don't ask your the workers in the sorting depots or the drivers to do anything. Right. It just this your sensing not scanning the presence of these trailers, which I think is important because it means or a it's less work, but be it's better compliance because human beings are human and they sometimes forget to do things.
And so you don't have that issue. Absolutely. So the two main briefs when ever we have looked around the solution were that it does not require any user input. Whether it be the driver, be the doc operator or be anybody else. We wanted to work seamlessly. And yet the brief was that it should not just cater for role male sites. It should also cater for our you could save customer sites. How do you? Because when we talk about balancing that upstream and downstream.
You need to get a good handle of the numbers at both the place. It's not just one place. So with that brief, we looked at different technologies. We looked at RFID. We looked at BLE. And within that evolution, we stumbled into a will you around the time. For me personally, I thought the will you brought the best of the two worlds together. Yes, there's a certain compromise on some of the RFD element, but it brings the best of both worlds, which was a perfect fight for our use case.
The way it will help us as you said, it takes those boxes that yes, you can deploy it at role male sites, but through a level of telematics or GPS tracking. You also get a sense of where the items are being dropped to customer sites. Very interesting. And I want to drill down into that a little bit more. And I don't want to turn this into a knocking the competition thing because I try and be editorially impartial, but I am biased.
I work for Williams. I love what we do. And I think it's important. But I'm wondering if you can compare Ambion IoT with a battery powered Bluetooth solution. What are the pros and cons of that? And can you compare Ambion IoT with RFID and the pros and cons of that? Because it's never one side is always a positivism and negatives on both sides.
And you know, you're a solution architect, you're thinking about the business requirements. And it's going to be different in different situations. But for tracking of containers in a vehicle, what was your assessment of the pros and cons of say battery powered Bluetooth versus battery free Bluetooth? Let's start there. So purely just answering that question. We didn't see much difference between the two battery less and battery free.
The big factor was not from a technology perspective. The big difference was the cost element of it. The replacement element of it because the moment you introduce a power source or a power dependent IoT device. You need to look at how would you replace that power source when it runs out. So when the battery dies, are you looking at another extensive round of deployments in an operation environment? So what's the complexity around it?
So I would say that was the big take for us that being battery less, you have to do it once. Yes, you obviously you would have to repair things that have gone wrong. But theoretically, these are expected to last multiple years or without damage. Probably indefinitely.
So once you deploy a battery free technology and you have the source to energize them all the time, you're just done and once. So that was one of the key, I would say differentiator. I think when we looked at the solution, we didn't look at just for container tracking. We said, OK, let's step back. Let's adopt a technology that could do multiple different use cases and track them. So we invest in it once rather than be use case dependent on containers now and then few years down the line.
Think about, oh, how can we deploy this on our persons? So the moment you have battery, you are introducing the bulkiness. You're introducing how would you recycle it? You are introducing elements of, OK, you have this technology for your contains the asset or what about passes, then you have duplication everything. So this is where, as I said, when we stumble on to will the three things that attracted us the most, the form factor.
So that was a big take for us. A second battery less. That's also as the complex deployment cycles that we would have to go through. So that's another take for us. And the third element, I think bringing both the RFID and the benefits of the early, the for the really aspect also rose up quite significantly because thousands of role models sites, you can put in RFID and sort of sure all you want.
And it's a little bit more expensive. You can't do anything. Even though it might be expensive, it one time kind of a capital investment. You can't do any of that at your customer's sites. You can't deploy that solution. I third party sites that might be helping you with your supply chain. Like the customer brokers that we have where we receive items from international, you could say our customers or we ship items internationally.
That they call those boxes. And this is where with a small compromise for which we might still end up using technologies within the RFID space. But overarching the big, you could say, proportion of our use cases were very easily met by selecting will out. And essentially that led us to say, OK, it's a good candidate for a solution not just for our immediate use case.
And also what's coming down the line when we deploy this on parcels, when we ship them through our network, would we be able to see them? We had a very interesting example of where we shipped some of these tags in our vehicles that was already fitted with the equipment. And you could see a large number of items being shipped through that truck, not just containers. And that through a survey a bit because we thought our data logic wasn't working correctly.
But when we investigated, we found, I know exactly these were actual will your Toyota pixels in thousands moving through that vehicle. And I think roughly the number was around 3000 of those pixels moving through that vehicle. So the tags are called IOT pixels. And you found that for some reason someone had shipped a real of these things. And so they were showing up in huge numbers. That's fascinating. Let's go back to RFID. Very mature technology, kind of last major.
Gen 2 update was the turn of the millennium. So it's seasoned. And it's getting, you know, broad deployment, especially at the item level where the tags are very, very low cost. What persuaded you that ambient IOT was the right way to go for Royal Mail for your use cases versus RFID? So one of the, as I said, it's, it's implemented vastly in the industry, not just you could say, postal industry, but across the different retail and others. So it's really mature.
And so that's the big limitation that we saw from RFID perspective that you have to let that item go through a particular part of your building, where you have deployed that infrastructure for it to be read. And so that means all the exit and entry points in your site, you need to kind of have that technology deployed. So that kind of exponentially grows when you have large warehouses. Then you may sound about, or how would you track that at your customer site?
We looked at deploying RFID infrastructure in our vehicles, but the installation of that can be very complex. Introduces more points of failure. So from that point of view, we said, okay, even though how mature RFID is to take some of those boxes about the full trail of items being picked up from Royal Mail site and being delivered to customer or any other site in our network.
We need to go with them in entirety. So that was probably the tipping, you could say, reason for us to suffer. Otherwise, for certain US cases where you need to know what exactly is in front of me, that's still RFID. We are not immune to that fact. We understand that there might be applications of RFID within Royal Mail.
Majority of a US cases are more affordability perspective. And in terms of coverage perspective are back to delivered by Mbint IoT. So you scale that scope significantly of opportunities that it can do. We carry around thousands of devices. All of our post is carry a postal distance assistant. This postal digital assistant, this is like a PDA, a personal assistant or a phone type device.
Phone type device is exactly. It's Android based devices. We're going to potentially look at whether these devices could also in a, you could say seamless, automated way in an Mbint environment where you can still read these containers.
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Yes. So because our footprint is not limited to these thousands of sites and the challenge being that these sites would open up and go down knowing the exact position of it, knowing the exact inventory in real time would give us a better challenge of, okay, we know where the assets are.
We know which sites have surplus. We know which sites are in dire need of it now. How do we orchestrate the vehicle movements, either the existing ones, or if we need to put in extreme cases, new ones to get them to the places that they need. So just to wrap up the RFID comparison, it sounds like you didn't want to just have a limited number of choke points and because I'm assuming the cost of the readers and that infrastructure was a factor is that it is.
As I said, with every choke point, it goes exponential, the number of choke points, the number of sites. It would have essentially made the business case unaffordable. Right. Well, let's talk about the business case because I think I've got huge respect for what you've done because we have hundreds of customers and quite a few who've experimented with and love the use cases. Only a few of them have actually been able to get this to scale to very large scale like you have done.
And I think part of it is when there's a technology that is part of a new wave, then you're dealing with a lot of skepticism from people in your own organization. And in particular, you know, your financial team, your CFO, is job is to be the break.
And the thing that I think was masterful on your side is if you look at Post-M parcel, there's all sorts of amazing use cases, which you've talked about doing in the future, tracking letters and parcels and being able to sense the temperature of those things. And they're all revenue upside opportunities, but you focused and you started on basically efficiency and cost reduction. Can you talk a bit more about the rationale behind taking that approach?
So my role has been to kind of look at the middle mile operations of role mail and look at what are the key digital transformation could we introduce in that space. We have a large extensive automation network where we scan the items through our, you could say the large machines that we have, the two big herbs and a lot of machine automation in our mail centers through that we get a good accurate record of where the items were last seen.
So all the focus has been around giving customer the notifications about where the item has gone through the pipeline, but not necessarily a full view to operations to say, yeah, we have seen it last process there, but is it in on time to be delivered to the next site. We have those kind of a capsule in between at the moment. So the main. Or you could say aspiration was to create that visibility of parcel in between those kinds to say, how is it moving between those sites between those kinds.
And once you know that information, once you have that additional data, you can do a lot of different things with it. You would generate the insights that you have never seen before because the element of a surprise, which could be items today we are going to have a spike at one site is known affront, you know it in advance that this many items have been processed in your upstream site or customer sent here.
How many are expected to hit the site, you can understand it from the resource thing element of it that are you resourcely equipped enough based upon what you have done in the past. So if you're processed 10,000 items in a given site in a given time frame, what sort of resource profile did you require for it?
What sort of a vehicle moments you require to move that item. So you get all that granular level of information all centrally not just limited to the people who are actually operating things on the ground. So the lens that it would create for us within our operation would be significant. That's where first we would have started with as you said operational efficiency. But once we get the handle of the data we get to understand a lot more about what this can offer us.
We would generate more and more you could say insights for not just for our operations, but also our sending customers to let them know in advance that. So you may want to inform your customers that a certain set of parcels might get delayed because unfortunately our vehicle has been in a breakdown or it has had a traffic accident. Currently we are not necessarily sure what items could be in there.
But you know that the vehicles had a problem, but here you have the data to tie it potentially back to the past. But I think and just at one basic level my understanding is that the data that you have, you can simply look at, do I have the right number of vehicles, do I have the right size of vehicles.
And so you potentially have opportunities to cut the capital associated with vehicles, you can right size the vehicles, you can potentially save on on fuel and and allocation of labor to moving the things around. So it seems very basic tracking a rolling cage, but actually it's like it's giving you this real time visibility, I hate to use the term xray because that implies a snapshot, but you have this kind of continuous live view of the way things are operating.
One of the things that I want to go ahead just on onto that, put the context around it because somebody might think, okay, why is that important. Obviously you only depart the vehicle when it is full, why are you departing half empty vehicles. That's a very interesting context for postal operators around the world that where, for example, in UK, where we abide by us, universal service obligation, we have to deliver items on time.
It does not necessarily mean that the vehicle can wait until it is full, the vehicle has to depart on time so that it could make the items could make their own word connection and get delivered to the destination on time. So network is scheduled more around time based, like how a train would leave on time. The airplane would leave on time, it won't wait for it to wait for being full, it has to leave on time.
So from those elements, you need to understand what's the pattern or the trend over the time. And that's where, as you said, understanding that day in day out, you implement that intelligence back into your network planning to say, okay, by the way, we have scheduled these many departures from this side to A to side B. Do you really need four or could we manage with three or do we still need four, but you could, as you said, you can drop down the vehicle size to be it more efficient.
Getting more efficient means you are utilizing them well, not just reducing the operational cost, but also from environment and sustainability perspective, you bring your camera emissions way down. So I think that's the initial call for us. And that's where once you start to understand those patterns and behaviors, you would be able to establish what needs to change to meet our business objectives and targets while delivering it in a sustainable manner.
So I think that's a good answer to why do this. And I think we've given a sense of what, at least it's being done today. I'd like to talk a bit about where you're planning on taking it into the future. But maybe there's a few more details we can add to the how. One of the things that I really love about what you've done is that you've got redundancy in the tagging. You've got people will see the videos of this.
You can see there's actually not one tag on every roll in cage, but there's three tags and it may be kind of grandiose, but I always think of like the Apollo mission where they had three computers just in case one fails. And so you've basically got redundancy. You've got fail over because of the harsh conditions.
And so those chips get smashed. You could spend a lot of money on hardening the tags, but the tags is sufficiently cheap that you can just put three of them on and you have that redundancy. So that's one level of thing, but maybe we should just talk a bit about the software architecture. So does Royal Mail have a control digital control tower? What is a digital control tower if you have one and how is that connected with the ambient IoT software because amio IT isn't just a tag.
It's a network of readers and it's also a cloud as well. Absolutely. So the key aspect for us was that we can't just rely on once data set, which is where the containers are. You need to enrich that with other information that we have for our network. That what are the contents of that container without that it becomes kind of yes, it's still an important information, but it gets restricted to asset management, but not necessarily the supply chain delivery.
And that's a really key thing. I think one of the barriers to adoption of this technology has been the asset management is kind of in its own world. The people that manage these reusable transport items are separated from essentially the supply chain aspects and you've joined them up. It's a nested all effect. Eventually we are in the business of delivering items. So everything has to be looked at from the focus of how the item is moving through our network.
And that was a big sea change and why we selected will you why we looked at all the different solutions and why this all made sense because our focus was look at the parcel. How do you get the information as much as possible about the parcels journey through our network. What role will your role would play in that place and that was what was the main you could say, Jekyll in our element that yeah, we have all the data about where we are scanning the items.
We are taking it from customers delivering it to the end point, but we have the missing link in between about how do we join the dots from last scene to have that live visibility of the item. And from that business architecture point of view, we wanted all that data to come into a role environment. We are developing a digital twin of role male multiple dashboards into what we call a digital control tower.
Not just for one business use case, but more for enterprise wide view where every business area is looking from the data from the same source perspective. Because what we didn't want to build was isolated elements of solutions scattered around. We don't want systems where same system or another system is reporting a value X, whereas another system is reporting why we want to bring them all into that common place.
So we have a lot of information already about the items going through a network through the scans. So sharing it with the machine information about which items are in which container we get the information about association that this particular item is in this container now. But then the another element which is where will your help us was that we can now track that as a cluster moving across our network.
You could see those items because you can see that container you've joined the other information and that gives you the entire flow. How does it help you can tell the site which is processing it to say your process the item that it hasn't left the site. Do you want to see something on the ground to say why it hasn't left the site. You can let this site which is expected to receive that by the way, there are these many containers with these items ready for you to receive.
Either they're on their way, you could see them or they're going to bring about so to get all those insights it was key for us that we take the niche skills of ambient IoT, will your cloud platform those core you could say analytics that you generate. In just them into our platforms and then make that wider enterprise view because that's where the value gets extracted in alone as you said asset management would be just an island in itself. It would have its own benefit significantly.
But you bring that into a joined up. You could say organization you need to bring in the other data sources so then you can go from the network plan to asset management using the same sort of capabilities. What we are telling as additional twin of role male additional control tower. Last thing I want to ask you about is the future and you said that one of the things that influenced you to adopt ambient IoT was not just low cost visibility in real time for rolling cages it was other things.
What are your plans, thoughts, aspirations in terms of how this technology will be applied in Royal Mal in the future. So what we perform at the moment is the last leg of the bigger supply chain if we want to call it the bigger supply chain what I mean is items being manufactured in the manufacturing house they getting shipped to large retailers somebody online placing in order and retailer then dispatching that item through a postal provider.
So we can be in any country and then it getting delivered to the doorstep so the for me the end to supply chain is manufacturing to doorstep. Currently with the only other just with containers we are delivering the middle mile aspect of the last leg. I think collectively or this ambit IoT whether all the major players in this need to start looking at how can we bring the cost of the solution or share the cost of the solution upstream in the pipeline.
So the goal of a back so that it becomes seamless that you could track the item just using the same technology just using the same kind of elements from manufacturing all the way to the doorstep. So build it into the product as it's being made that's kind of your vision of the future which I absolutely agree with and given all the standards work this with IEEE and ambit IoT going into Wi-Fi and with 3GPP with ambit IoT going into the cellular standards.
I think that will bring in some of the biggest technology companies in the world the people that make the Wi-Fi access points people that make the phones the carriers that sell them so you can see that Royal Mail may well have found has found this incredible way to optimize their part of the business but there's a bigger picture with
even larger global technology companies and CPG and a power manufacturer and drug companies that could all integrate the same technology and we could do this end to end. If we kind of zoom in on the kind of the few of the next steps what are the things that you aspire to use the technology to do over the next year or two. So we have started with the vehicles and asset tracking on the vehicles when they are in transit.
We're looking at deploying the same ambit IoT infrastructure, same very devices inside of buildings so that you just don't have visibility in transit but also you get start to get the visibility within the site as well.
That's when you could start offering those capabilities that are this solution is not just about asset tracking or transit. This is also move to time kind of understanding of the items and how do you get that by knowing it at all times and what we are looking at is some of our largest sites we are looking to roll it roll this capability out depending upon the success we would want to roll it out to other sites.
Hopefully collectively I think will you turn ourselves we would have some I would say customers who are willing to go us on that journey because the journey which I mentioned from manufacturing to the door strap would not be met overnight I think we have to take chunks out of it.
The image of chunk would be is what's immediate left to the last leg which is the item within the customer warehouse so how you go into that space then you go further left so I think that's where we want to expand and continue. Roll mail as a group has a wider you could say organizations for print whether could we take the learnings and implementations from roll mail into the wider group companies and how do we make it more integrated because.
I think the interconnected world in this sense is essential but we go one step at a time find all the you could say how those that we find in that space how do we overcome them. Obviously the moment you go to item level or those spaces will have to be careful about the security needs any data production elements but I think it's it's a very very I would never ending exciting journey that I think the ambentiyotty would explode into over the coming years very good.
And then lastly sustainability what are the opportunities from a sustainability point of view with solution that you've designed. Key element image at the everybody wants to understand the carbon footprint of an item being delivered so by understanding that at more granular level you can bring in measures on how do you bring it down.
So that's the other element of how does this help first of all knowing the exact footprint because that can become a challenge in an untracked environment once you understand that footprint you.
Understand the measures that are required you understand the hotspot areas you look at the alternate you could say measures that you need to do role model really looking at electric vehicles we are already looking at alternate fuels for the larger trucks well and your last mile has a good proportion of foot on foot delivery so you have one of the lowest carbon footprints for the very last mile and.
I think you know the idea of tracking the carbon for the delivery of a package is is super exciting and being able to share that with. Customers and you have so many customers you have the enterprise customers but you have every individual in United Kingdom. Yeah. Clad to millions or even more I would say yeah addresses that we deliver to and and we promised you to leave what at the same price. So you're like the architect of this amazing I would say historic ambient IOT solution.
How did you get this job what what's if someone else wants to architect an amazing groundbreaking IOT solution what what should they know about how you got to where you are now. I think the critical bit is identifying what capabilities already exist in your organization and what business problem you're trying to solve.
Yes. Don't try to introduce new tech just for the sake of it because it's school it's modern right I think just find it niche within your organization that what actual business problem with its own. But from a career perspective really was what is what I was thinking about I mean you grew up you grew up in India. Yep. What was your education and life experience like so like more Indians you could say when they're growing up they want to be become a crecass.
Oh crecass. Oh. And as you cricket cricket was good. But you can imagine with a billion plus population the competition is quite high and then eventually you kind of okay you need to fall back on something yeah the next interest for me was computer games playing them all the time.
And then that said okay I need to do something related to computing and nothing else so that like to be going to engineering complete my bachelor of technology and computer engineering and then going to the IT industry so that's effectively I would say true for most you could say Indian children so I'm not lived a separate life it's more of a pattern that was good followed and joined one of the big organizations data consultancy.
What's fortunate enough that very early in my you could say initially is I was able to work with the senior leadership over there and then eventually stay there for good long time and then moved towards transition to roll mail. So you joined role mail as a consultant.
So as a solution architect for them okay effectively I wanted to continue my technical roles that I have to adapt over the time and as you said build solutions rather than going to the project management program management not that I can't do it but that didn't generate that interest in me.
So effectively that's what led to kind of a sticking with it wanted to join organizations and make the change from within because otherwise if you're a consultant you get the solution given to you to implement rather than to enforce or to form that way and that was my keep how do I get into that space yeah because being a consultant you can offer remedies.
But you don't necessarily get to identify the problem areas so that was my key for it or how can solve the problem areas or identify first in in the first place right what are those gaps and how do we kind of find technology or answers around it and not always technology sometimes a simple process change can help with it yeah that's.
You're causing me to reflect on my own career and I got to will you because I was a consultant and I was a consultant because I started a payments company called give the change which made everything more expensive so maybe that's why I didn't work out but it rounded everything up to the nearest dollar and 100% of the change went to the nonprofit that was sponsoring a payment card.
Anyway we were under capitalized didn't work out but it was an amazing experience and I started consulting just to help bootstrap the company and I thought I'd hate it but I love it but the thing because you get so much variety and you get to sort of dip in you don't have to put up with the politics you can pretty much say anything it's just a gig so you can be super honest.
But I really had this feeling of being an outsider and I was like the the kid with their nose on the planet pane of grass glass looking in at a family around Christmas it was like oh they have these parties and that culture and I don't get to be part of that but the thing I didn't think about was what you said was as a consultant you get the terms of reference given to you.
But when you're on the inside then you can potentially define the terms of reference absolutely and going out into that operational world I didn't that's the biggest change I've seen in my son fires and when you said in a that what they call isn't every tower that architect so technology sets in every tower and defines the solution over there it does not necessarily translate that well in the operational field but once you have gone to the operational field see how things actually work on the ground.
Then you can come back with the solution really going to work yeah because the good solution on paper does not necessarily always translate yeah into something that could be operationalize across thousands of people you could say in our case where we have thousands of customers thousands of sites and good workforce of 140,000 at the peak time well.
Well there's a lot of people how do you roll out a change yeah that can work for that scale yeah so you can really be intimate with the problem and the people when you're on the inside that that makes total sense so before we wrap up the show I we've got to go back to something that we started talking about earlier this you know one of the weirdest experiences for me.
Was when I got to talk on BBC news about will you and you often wonder what is it like and I've done a few of these podcasts I assumed it would be like that only you know times times 10 or whatever but the really weird thing was they put you on like a zoom call and you can hear what's going on but you can't see anything you don't see who you're speaking to you don't see what's being shown on the news before.
After and so you're really blind and so I ended up it was just a very strange experience it was great it was like a bucket list thing being on the BBC. But you had a weird experience as well on the other side of that didn't you that was tell me about what happened to you it can't be any more spooky than that I've been actively walking on really or engagement at all mail for over two years now that seems how initial you could say when we connected.
I've been as I said traveling operational sites out of an operational site with some of the implementation work saying things work on the ground. I was I was I would say very patiently sleeping in my bed. I left the TV on that was that much how I'm a zone out that even with the running TV I just left and then very spooky I walk up and in front of me the TV screen had you.
I mentioned affiliate and that kind of you could say that instant you you wake up because you think I'm actually dreaming about something or is it for real because I'm working on something actively BBC running on and I see Steve on the screen talking about will you. So it took me few seconds to realize and then say oh that's weird that's maybe maybe I think because.
It probably the destiny was returning this to us maybe you you needed to have some of your fans in the UK watching you on the tally it was an all time i'm sure that they would have done multiple like creation suffered yeah the days will I think it was on twice but who's counting is the BBC so let's take. But it was yeah for Phil but this in how did you find will you.
I was tumbled into your podcast explaining about these new battery less tags which were completed it kind of immediately generated that interest that that sounds interesting we're looking for areas of. Capulators within that and that's where effectively the social media that revolution kind of a lead to.
So a really odd and you alright well that's amazing I love the fact that this podcast was helpful to you as a solution architect I mean that's you are essentially the persona that that we target with the. Podcast that the kind of person someone that's trying to solve a business problem wants to understand a broad set of technologies and is architecting the solution so i'm so glad it worked and i'm so glad that you.
Built the solution that you did and that you've been willing to talk to us about it so neton thank you again for being on the podcast it's been great to have you thank you thank you for having me. So that was my interview with neton i hope you enjoyed it i am sincerely grateful to everyone that tunes in that listens that watches the podcast it feels like a community that.
I get to bump into folks that have caught a few of these episodes and it's a wonderful thing i feel like there's a community of us that are working to understand the technology on this new frontier i also want to thank Aaron Hammock who edits the show.
Jesse Hazelrig who has worked with the wonderful team here in Miami to record this Sierra Walden who gets the episode out publishes it and of course Royal Mail for allowing us to share some of the learnings that they have got in a very unique way being on the front end of. Of this exciting technology so until next time thank you goodbye be safe and enjoy the journey.
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