International Post Corporation (IPC), a cooperative association of 24 national postal services from countries in Europe, Asia Pacific and North America, has developed and implemented a harmonized labeling solution that enables posts to optimize the end-to-end processing of international letters and parcels.
The new solution ensures uniformity based on the existing standard UPU S10 barcode by using a set of standardized address elements, icons and layouts. The new label will present significant improvements for e-retailers and consumers by reducing over labeling while also improving track and trace, quality and transit times.
Alan Barrie, director, operations and technology, IPC, said, “This is not just a technical initiative to align the essential data elements underpinning e-commerce fulfillment, it’s also a practical visual alignment to give thousands of postal workers clear instructions on how to deal with the rapidly growing e-commerce volumes. Customers are demanding the same experience cross-border that they enjoy in their home country and this is a great initiative by postal companies to improve the consistency of their service offering.”
The harmonized label is available as part of the IPC ‘Interconnect’ initiative to help
improve cross-border parcel operations. Posts are expected to start using the harmonized label by early 2016.
October 22, 2015