Poczta Polska is an enterprise with over 450 years of tradition, being one of the oldest institutions in Poland. It has approximately 8,400 post offices and is one of the largest postal operators on the market, not only in Poland but also in Central Europe.
The company is also one of the largest organizations in Poland in terms of the number of people employed (over 95,000 employees). As the national operator, Poczta Polska is a provider of universal postal services rendered throughout the country. Among the wide range of services offered are those related to direct marketing, courier services, banking, insurance and financial services, as well as those related to the sale of goods and cash logistics and parcel protection. Poczta Polska handles several billion various types of postal items annually, including approximately 400 million registered items.
Beginning of cooperation. Cooperation between GS1 Poland and Poczta Polska began in 2000. After a year of developing specifications for the requirements of the postal sector, an official decision was issued by the Management Board of Poczta Polska to start using SSCC numbers to identify registered mail. In order to fully meet the requirements of the postal sector, where there is a need to identify a wide range of services, the structure and data format shown in Figure 1 were adopted. In the first years of the project to implement GS1 standards by Poczta Polska, the SSCC number presented in the GS1-128 barcode symbology (called the R Label by Poczta Polska) was used to identify registered mail (Figure 2). In subsequent years, its use was started on an increasingly larger group of services offered by Poczta Polska, including: collective packaging, business mail, postal parcels, cash-on-delivery shipments, and registered letters with declared value.
In 2005, all shipments mentioned in Figure 1 were identified using the SSCC number.
To streamline the processes of sending and delivering registered mail throughout the country, new rules regarding the labeling of registered mail based on a new R label were introduced at the beginning of 2012 (Figure 3). The new R label has 3 partial stickers with a barcode in the GS1-128 symbology, which contains the IZ, that is, the SSCC number:
1. green sticker – placed on the registered mail posting confirmation,
2. yellow sticker – intended for postmen during the delivery phase of the shipment to the recipient,
3. blue sticker – intended for use on the “receipt confirmation” – if the customer decides to use this complementary service.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 2/2012.
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