Wiliot Ambient IoT Deployment with Royal Mail

Transcript

• Steve Statler 0:00

  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 ambient IoT, but this time, we're going to look at how the whole thing comes together. I'm doing this podcast with Nitin Kamboj, 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 Nitin. So enjoy the Mr. Beacon ambient IoT podcast is sponsored by Wiliot, bringing intelligence to every single thing. So Nitin, welcome to the Mr. Beacon podcast.

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 1:25

  Thank you, Steve. Thank you for having me. Well,

  
  

  Steve Statler 1:27

  I am super excited. We cover a lot of different technologies on the podcast. It's sponsored by Wiliot, but I make a point of trying to include alternative technologies, competitive technologies, but this week, we're going to focus on ambient IoT and Wiliot technology, because you work for Royal Mail, and we've just announced your together the deployment of Wiliot 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 and deployed it. And, you know, in my opinion, this is a really historic use of this technology that I think will change change the way businesses operate in the future. And it's wonderful to see Royal Mail as a institution that is approximately 500 years old. Started off in the first customer was Henry the Eighth it first technical innovation was the postage stamp, the famous Penny Black. I mean, that's pretty innovative. And now Royal Mail has deployed roughly two and a half million Wiliot 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 make sense and are interesting. What is it that you have done at Royal Mail? What is Royal Mail using ambient IoT for 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, but maybe you know what? In summary, you're tagging these rolling cages, right? Yep, that's correct. And you call them Yorks.

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 3:52

  We call them Yorks. Why do you call them Yorks? Interesting trivia around it. York is a city in England, as most listeners would know, effectively, they were what I'd like to believe. I'm not sure how much it is correct, but I'm like to believe that they were first used in that facility, okay? And when they started to pop over in other parts of our network, somebody would ask you, what's that? And they started calling, oh, that's yoke, because that's from yoke and that's how the name has kind of continued, and it's still late. It has been, they have been called yokes. So

  
  

  Steve Statler 4:28

  these are metal cages. They're on they're on wheels. They're, I don't know, five or six feet high, something like that. And they basically carry the letters and the parcels around the absolutely

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 4:39

  so all our network. Movements within our network happens on these containers. Letters, as you said, they go in plastic trays. Those rays 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 item. 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.

  
  

  Steve Statler 5:13

  So these York 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. And in this case, the, you know, it's not oxygen, it's letters and parcels. So these things are full of letters and parcels, absolutely, and then, and you're tracking them. How do you track them? Using Wiliot technology.

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 5:42

  Yep, so there's an interesting history around it. We have been looking at solutions in this space. What we ended up with 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 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 2000s of sites. We have 1000s of container we have already tagged more than 800,000 containers. So

  
  

  Steve Statler 6:28

  you and each one has got a unique ID, right? It's got asset ID that's being tracked. Why is it important to know where they are, because that's fundamentally what the system does.

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 6:45

  Yeah. So as I said, 1000s of sites, 800,000 containers. They eventually go from a place, from customer, you get the container with full of items by the letters or 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 end 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 this 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 how more efficiently we can manage within our operations with that same set of containers. So

  
  

  Steve Statler 7:53

  if you if you don't have the rolling cages where they need to be, then basically the mail stops. You've got nothing to put the letters and parcels in. So it's really important that they are distributed and available so that, so that there aren't delays.

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 8:11

  Absolutely compromises everything. It compromises our customer service. It compromises our mental mile, and it compromises kind of the lock champs that we might have in our final buyer. So maintaining that balance across all sides, 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 means it's not able to meet the service. So at the heart of it is the universal sub 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 or we might exponentially increase our cost, because We might find other ways to continue to and maintain our quality.

  
  

  Steve Statler 9:23

  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? What is upstream in this context? So

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 9:40

  customers, so we are essentially, if we 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 the. A home address. That's the role that we play in that we ingest the items from these large, wholesale retail, you could say, customers of ours, who basically give the item or the trust scroll mail to deliver it on time for 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 customers down to the doorstep, but the things that we use to move that item, which is our containers, they still need to go back so that the next cycle of items could go through that's kind of a repeat so, so this is where it's a cyclic loop that we need to continue and maintain across 1000s of customer sites and 1000s of role model sites. So

  
  

  Steve Statler 10:56

  who would so an example customer might be or some kind of retailer who wants to ship products to their customers, and you would give them some rolling cages, just enough that they they're, they're basically, they have what they need to put the packages in. How do you How did you know how many they needed before. And what does putting all of these online with ambient IoT do to change that

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 11:29

  so 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 in 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. So it's a very manual process. At the moment, there's no proper record of it, or, I should say, before we implemented the ambient IoT, 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 ambient IoT. What we look to do, or the aim is that we want to try and as much as automize, 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 oversupply, because oversupply means that some other part of the operation would get compromised, or under supply your customer, because then the service to them would get compromised. So it's finding that right balance,

  
  

  Steve Statler 13:05

  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 the 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 are these things?

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 13:46

  Yep, so we're talking about approximately about anywhere between six to 7000 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 1000s of parcels. So they operate across the entire of the UK geography. The deployment has been very, I would say, interesting challenge, because how do you deploy new 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 IoT 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,

  
  

  Steve Statler 14:45

  so you have the raw mail vans, beautiful red vehicles that take to 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 ton big vehicles and 1000s of those that are already deployed. And what are the readers that you're using just out of interest?

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 15:19

  So we worked collectively with, will you attend one of the manufacturers called erm? Erm, okay, and we developed a bespoke device, not in terms of technology bespoke, but bespoke for an automotive environment, because we wanted something that can last the harsh weather of you could say, being exposed to snow, rain, because some of the time these vehicles, they are open, so the rain, the moisture, cannot last over there, the vibrations that you get caused by the vehicle moving, so you develop that bespoke device. And voltage spikes, voltage spikes, current spikes, yeah, it just as tougher and operational environment that you can experience, Yeah, completely different to any equipment that you would deploy inside a building. So it does need to land into those harsh environments. So this is where erm who have good experience in telematics, type of devices. So they brought in their expertise around developing equipment for the vehicles. They worked with villiard to have the technology expertise and obviously roll mail. From our perspective, we provide the design needs or considerations the temperature range in UK, could 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. But what about the environment within these large trucks? Because they have somewhat like a solar cooker, or kind of you're putting it in, in another one exactly. So the 40 degrees outside could easily translate into 5055, degree inside a vehicle, because of that chamber Centigrade. We're talking about absolutely centigrade, yeah. And so we wanted a device that would last, yes, and also perform within that environment. And we wanted a fit and forget device. We didn't want it to go back again and again, manage it, fix it. We want 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 ton maturity of our deployment. It's still in progress, as the scale would always demand, or have challenges associated around it, right?

  
  

  Steve Statler 17:53

  So how many of these erm Bluetooth ambient, IoT Bluetooth readers are there in each of these trucks.

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 18:04

  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. Ideally, 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, you don't have just one Wi Fi access point. You have a some sort of a fail fall back 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 their length 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, where you have a stack of containers that would go on a lower deck, 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 lower deck. 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, varying because of the different specs we have bought over time. Yeah.

  
  

  Steve Statler 19:37

  And just sort of operationally, I 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. You're sensing, not scanning, the presence of these trade. This, which I think is important, because it means or a, it's less work, but B, it's better compliance, because human beings are human, and they sometimes forget to do things, and so you don't have that issue. Is that fair to say?

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 20:16

  Absolutely. So the two main briefs, whenever we have looked around the solution were that it does not require any user input, whether it be the driver, be it the dock operator or be anybody else. We want it to work seamlessly. And the other brief was that it should not just cater for role mail sites. It should also cater for our you could say 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 viliot Around that time. For me, personally, I thought viliot 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 fit for our use case, the way it will help us, as you said, it tick those boxes that, yes, you can deploy it at role mail 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.

  
  

  Steve Statler 21:38

  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 Wiliot. I love what we do, and I think it's important. But I'm wondering if you can compare ambient IoT with a battery powered Bluetooth solution. What are the pros and cons of that? And can you compare ambient IoT with RFID and the pros and cons of of that? Because it's it's never one sided. There's always positives 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 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.

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 22:42

  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 operational environment? So what's the complexity around it? So I would say that was the big tick for us, that being battery less, you have to do it once. Yes, 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 in 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, okay, 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 Parsons? So the moment you have battery, you are introducing the bulkiness. You're introducing, how would you recycle it, you are introducing elements of, okay, you have this technology for your contains asset or what about parcels? Then you have duplication everything. So this is where, as I said, when we stumbled onto villiard, the three things that attracted us the most the form factor. It's small, or it can be easily extended to the parcel. So that was a big tech for us, a second battery lives. Oh, that solves us the complex deployment cycles that we would have to go through. So that's another tick for us. And the third element I've been bringing both the RFID and the benefits of BLE the affordability aspect, also rose up quite six. Significantly, because 1000s of roles sites. You can put in RFID infrastructure all you want, and you can manage it, maintain it, even though it might be expensive, it one time, kind of a capital investment. You can't do any of that at your customer sites. You can't deploy that solution like third party sites that might be helping you with your supply chain, like the custom brokers that we have where we receive items from international, you could say our customers, or we ship items internationally. So how do you find a solution that tick all 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 villi out. And essentially that led us to say, OK, it's a good candidate for a solution, not just for our immediate use case, but 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 threw us away a bit because we thought our data logic wasn't working correctly. But when we investigated, we found no exactly these were the actual video Toyota pixels in 1000s moving through that vehicle. And I think roughly the number was around 3000 of those pixels moving through that vehicle.

  
  

  Steve Statler 26:44 

    So the tags are called IoT pixels, and you found that, for some reason, someone had shipped a reel 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 two update was the turn of the millennium. So it's, 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?

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 27:36

  So one of the, as I said, it's it's implemented vastly in in the industry, not just, you could say, postal industry, but across the different retail and others. So it's very mature. The one big limitation that we saw from a RFID perspective that you have to let the item go through a particular path of your building like a choke point, like a choke point where you have deployed that infrastructure for it to be ruined. Now 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 miss out about 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. It again introduces more points of failure. So from that point of view, we said, okay, even though how mature RFID is to tick some of those boxes about the full trail of items being picked up from raw milk site and being delivered to customers or any other site in our network, you need to go with ambient IoT. So that was probably the tipping, you could say, reason for us to store for otherwise, for certain use 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 rolemel, but majority of our use cases are more affordably. Affordability perspective, and in terms of coverage perspective, are better delivered by ambient IoT. So you scale that scope significantly of opportunities that it can do. We carry around 1000s of devices. All our posters carry a postal digital assistant.

  
  

  Steve Statler 29:41

  And this postal digital assistant, this is like a PDA, like a digital assistant or a phone type device. Phone

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 29:48

  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 ambient environment where you can still read these containers. Yes, so because our footprint is not limited to these 1000s 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, if 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.

  
  

  Steve Statler 30:43

  So just to wrap up the RFID comparison, it sounds like, you know, you didn't want to just have a limited number of choke points. And because I'm assuming the costs of the readers and that infrastructure was a factor, is that it is,

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 31:00

  it is, as I said, with every chalk point, it goes exponential, the number of chalk points, number of sides, it would have essentially made the business case unaffordable,

  
  

  Steve Statler 31:13

  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, but only a few of them have actually been able to get this to scale, to very large scale, like 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 from people in your own organization, and in particular, you know your financial team, your CFO, his job is to, is to be the break and and the thing that I think was masterful on your side is if, if you look at post and parcel, there's all sorts of amazing use cases, which you've talked about doing in the future, tracking the 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?

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 32:47

  So my role has been to kind of look at the middle mile operations of Royal 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 atoms through our you could say the large machines that we have, the two big hubs and 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 vo two operations to say, yeah, yeah, we have seen it last process there, but is it a known time to be delivered to the next site? We have those kind of gaps in between at the moment. So the main, or you could say aspiration, was to create that visibility of parcel in between those scans, to say, how is it moving between those sides, between those cans. And once you know that information, once you have that additional data, you can do 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, oh, items today, we are going to have a spike at one site is known upfront. 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 resourcing element of it, that are you resourcefully equipped enough based upon what you've done in the past? So if you process 10,000 items in a given site in a given time frame, what sort of a resource profile Did you require for it? What sort of a vehicle moments you required 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 you. So the lens that it would create for us within our operation would be significant, and 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, let them know in advance that, okay, by the way, 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 short traffic accident. Currently, we are not necessarily sure what items could be in there, right?

  
  

  Steve Statler 35:48

  You know that the vehicles had a problem, but here you have the data to tie it potentially back to the parcel that's impacted. 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 x ray, but 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

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 36:59

  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 you're departing half empty vehicles? And that's a very interesting context for postal operators around the world, that where, for example, in UK, where we abide by uso, 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 onward 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 I just 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 site B. You really need four? Or could we manage with three? Or do we still need four? But you could, I just said you can drop down the vehicle size to be 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 carbon emissions way down. So I think that's that's the initial core for us, and that's where, once you start to understand those patterns and behaviors you would be able to establish or what needs to change to meet our business objectives and targets while delivering it in a sustainable manner.

  
  

  Steve Statler 38:57

  So I think that's a good answer to why do this, and I think we've given a sense of what at least is 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 and see there's actually not one tag on every rolling 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 redundance. You've got failover because of the harsh conditions. You know, if one of those chips gets smashed, you could spend a lot of money on harden the tags, but the tags are sufficiently cheap, but you can just put three of them on and you have that redundant. See. 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 ambient IoT isn't just a tag, it's a network of readers, and it's also a cloud as well, right? Yep,

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 40:27

  absolutely. So the key aspect for us was that we can't just rely on one's data set, which is where the containers are. You need to enrich that with other information that we have for our network, then 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,

  
  

  Steve Statler 40:56

  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 aspect, and you've joined them up.

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 41:15

  It's a nested all effect. Eventually we 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. I think that was this big C change, and why we selected value out 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 tool would play in that place? And that was, what was the main you could say, Jessie 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 mail environment. We are developing a digital twin of raw mail 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 y. We want to bring them all into that common place. So we have a lot of information already about the items going through our network, through the scans associating 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 viliot helped 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, you process the item but 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 the 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 viliard Cloud Platform, those core, you could say, analytics that you generate in ingest them into our platforms, and then make that wider enterprise for you, 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 terming as additional twin of roll mail, additional control tower.

  
  

  Steve Statler 44:47

  Very good. So 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 Mail in the future?

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 45:17

  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're getting shipped to large retailers, somebody online placing an order, and retailer then dispatching that item through a postal provider, beat any country, and then it getting delivered to the doorstep. So the for me, the end to end supply chain, is manufacturing to doorstep with currently with viliot, just with containers, we are delivering the middle mile aspect of the last leg, I think, collectively or this ambient 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, go all the way 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, yes,

  
  

  Steve Statler 46:24

  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 ambient IoT going into Wi Fi and with three GPP, with ambient 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 that 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 apparel manufacturers 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 a few of the next steps. What are the things that you aspire to use the technology to do over the next year or two?

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 47:35

  So we have started with the vehicles and asset tracking on the vehicles when they are in transit, we are looking at deploying the same ambient IoT infrastructure, same buddy devices inside our 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, because that's when you could start offering those capabilities that or this solution? It's 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 larger 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, and hopefully collectively, I think, will it and 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 strip, would not be met overnight. I think we have to take chunks out of it. The immediate chunk would be, is what's immediate left to the last leg, which is the item within the customer warehouse. So how do you go into that space? Then you go further left? So I think that's where we want to expand and continue raw mill as a group has a wider you could say, organizations footprint. 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, hurdles that we find in that space. How do we overcome them? Obviously, the moment you go to item level or those spaces, you'll have to be careful about the security needs, any data protection elements. But I think it's a very, very, I would say, Never ending, exciting journey that I think the ambient IoT would explode into over the coming years.

  
  

  Steve Statler 49:50

  Very good. And then lastly, sustainability. What are the opportunities from a sustainability point of view with. Solution that you've designed

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 50:02

  key element immediately 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 may already looking at electric vehicles. We are already looking at alternate fuels for the larger trucks

  
  

  Steve Statler 50:49

  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 the carbon for the delivery of a package is is super exciting, and being able to share that with customers. And you know, you have so many customers, you have the enterprise customers, but you have every individual in the United Kingdom,

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 51:22

  32 million or even more, I would say, Yeah, addresses that we deliver to and and we promised to deliver at the same price. So

  
  

  Steve Statler 51:30

  Nitin, you're like the architect of this amazing, I would say, historic, ambient IoT solution. How did you get this job? What's if someone else wants to architect an amazing, groundbreaking IoT solution, what should they know about how you got to where you are? Now, I think

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 51:56

  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 cool, it's modern, right? I think just find that niche within your organization that what actual business problem would it solve? But

  
  

  Steve Statler 52:17

  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?

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 52:28

  So, like most Indians, you could say, when they're growing up, they want to be, become a cricketer.

  
  

  Steve Statler 52:34

  Ah,

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 52:35

  how's your 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 led to me going to engineering complete my Bachelor of Technology in 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've not lived a separate life. It's more of a pattern that was got followed and joined one of the big organizations, Tata Consultancy, was fortunate enough that very early in my you could say initial years, I was able to work with the senior leadership over there, and then eventually stayed there for a good long time, and then moved over transition to Royal Mail.

  
  

  Steve Statler 53:36

  So you joined Royal Mail as a consultant, so

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 53:41

  as a solution architect for them, okay, effectively, I wanted to continue my technical roles that have developed 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 interested 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 vision. And that was my key. 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.

  
  

  Steve Statler 54:52

  Yeah, that's you're causing me to reflect on my own career, and I got to williot because i. I was a consultant. And I was a consultant because I'd 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 undercapitalized. It didn't work out, but it was an amazing experience. And I had started consulting just to help bootstrap the company. And I thought I'd hate it, but I ended up loving it. But the thing because you get so much variety, and you get to sort of dip in, and 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 it was like the kid with their nose on the plane at 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

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 56:21

  and going out into that operational world, I didn't that's the biggest change I've seen in myself, as in when you said, you know that what they call is in Ivory Tower, that architect so technology sits in Ivory 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, is the solution really going to work? Yeah, because a good solution on paper does not necessarily always translate yeah into something that could be operationalized across 1000s of people. You could say in our case, where we have 1000s of customers, 1000s of sites, and good workforce of 140,000 at the peak time. Wow, that's a lot of people. How do you roll out a change? Yeah, that can work for that scale.

  
  

  Steve Statler 57:15

  Yeah. So you can really be intimate with the problem and the people when you're on the inside. That makes total sense. So before we wrap up the show, I gotta we gotta 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 wiliot. And you often wonder, you know, 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 or after, and so you're really blind. And 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?

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 58:21

  It can't be any more spooky than that. I've been actively working on villiard engagement at roll mail for over two years now. Since our 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, seeing things work on the ground. I was, I would say, very patiently, sleeping in my bed, I left the TV on. That was that much how I was zoned out, that even with the running TV, I just slept. And then very spookily, I woke up and in front of me the TV screen. Had you mentioned affiliate and that kind of you could say in that instant, you you wake up because you think, Am I still dreaming about something, or is it for real? Because I'm working on something actively, BBC is running on and I see Steve on the screen talking about Wiliot. So it took me a few seconds to realize, and then say, Oh, that's weird. Maybe, maybe, I think, because it probably the destiny was written in the stars, maybe you you needed to have some of your fans in the UK watching you on the telly. It was an old time. I'm not sure whether they would have done multiple iterations of it. Yeah, the deer as well. I

  
  

  Steve Statler 59:41

  think it was on twice. But who's counting the BBC? So that's tick bucket list for Phil. But Nitin, how did you find Wiliot?

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 59:50

  I always look for the different technology innovations, some around asset. You could say tracking based. And that's where I asked. Bald into your podcast explaining about these new battery less tags, which were convoluted, it kind of immediately generated that interest that sounds interesting. We are looking for areas of capabilities within that, and that's where, effectively, the social media that revolution kind of led to me discover, Wiliot and you all

  
  

  Steve Statler 1:00:24

  right? 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 we target with the podcast, 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, Nitin, thank you again for being on the podcast. It's been great to have you.

  
  

  Nitin Kamboj 1:01:06

  Thank you. Thank you for having me.

  
  

  Steve Statler 1:01:08

  So that was my interview with Nitin. 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 occasion. 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 Hamma, who edits the show, Jessie Hazelrigg, 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 this exciting technology. So until next time, thank you. Goodbye. Be Safe and Enjoy the journey you.