The Postal Service is expecting its bar codes to do more with less.
Charlie Bravo, senior vice president of Intelligent Mail address quality at USPS, said the new, four-state bar codes will do more than simply track mail—they will let customers choose more services and help increase revenue both at USPS and in the private sector. They’re called four-state codes because they use four types of bar-code lines instead of the two currently used.
The bar code is the latest offering under Intelligent Mail—a program initiated in late 2001 that USPS expects, eventually, to let customers track every piece of mail from pickup to delivery.
Officials will formally unveil the new bar code at their annual trade show, the National Postal Forum, this week in Orlando, Fla.
The new bar codes pack nearly three times the data contained in existing ones, but in a much smaller space, Bravo said.
Right now, bar codes on a piece of mail are typically located in one or more of at least four different places surrounding the address and consist of two features—full bars and half bars. The bars detail such postal services as sorting, tracking, certified mail and change of address, Bravo said.
But under the four-state system, all that information will be moved into a single bar code running just above the outgoing address, giving mailers more options and reducing processing costs for the government, he said.
The new system makes use of four distinct types of lines in groups of 31—a full line, a small line, and two half-lines that jut up or down, each representing different pieces of data.
“Using [four-state] cleans up the envelope and frees up more real estate for marketing messages,” Bravo said. “A single code is easier to read, which results in better data, and requires a lot less ink than two or more codes, reducing costs.”
Jeff Freeman, USPS’ manager for mail technology strategy, said the new system is based on propriety software and runs on the Microsoft Windows platform, although the service is currently developing a Linux version as well.
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