New IoT solution for Finnish postal service Posti

Self-service postal lockers bring things to everyone’s reach and have made delivering and sending parcels more easy and efficient. Self-service lockers can also increase recycling and sustainability, and in the future, the lockers can be used to recycle all kinds of goods, not just parcels.

The number of parcels traveling through Posti’s self-service lockers is growing constantly: just between January and September 2019, the amount increased up to 56 %. Posti has announced earlier that it means to grow the number of self-service post lockers around Finland to 4000 service points by 2022. Each service point has between 30-800 individual lockers. It is clear that this kind of extensive, automated system requires a reliable, light, secure, and scalable IoT system in order to work. Since such a system did not yet exist, Posti chose Haltian as their partner in creating a new IoT solution.

The requirements for the new solution were for Posti to get more control over the lockers remotely and the communication needed to two-sided, i.e. the data needed to travel not just from Posti’s system to the lockers, but from the lockers to Posti as well.

From the beginning, it was clear that Haltian Thingsee IoT Solution Suite would be the best option for the solution since the Mesh network enables the service to scale up to thousands of devices, or in this case, lockers effortlessly.

The custom IoT development phase included new, wireless smart locks that communicate through Thingsee Gateway devices to Thingsee Operations Cloud and from there to Posti’s system.

With the new solution provided by Haltian, Posti will get reliable control over the lockers wirelessly. This means more real-time information about the status of the lockers, their use will be more efficient, and the security of the system will be improved. In the future, the wide self-service network will also enable recycling better than ever before.

Haltian’s Thingsee IoT platform takes care of the entire data transmission process from the smart locks to Posti’s system. In the new solution, the data-flow goes both ways, which enables efficient control of the lockers directly from Posti’s system. The two-way data-flow will also make customer service faster and more flexible. The lockers can also be filled a lot faster and more easily when the couriers can open the lockers faster and with better control.

The new self-service lockers are already in use in many places in Finland, and the same system is being used in Posti’s recently launched Box, a huge online store focused retail space in central Helsinki.