page_title: Package tracking
section_title: Identification
hierarchical_section_title: Package tracking / Identification
caption_attribution_description: English: A member of staff at a radio-pharmaceutical manufacturer (GE Healthcare) at Amersham, Bucks, United Kingdom, views his control gun as he prepares to process the next order of radioactive materials. 15 December 2011
context_page_description: Package tracking or package logging is the process of localizing shipping containers, mail and parcel post at different points of time during sorting, warehousing, and package delivery to verify their provenance and to predict and aid delivery.
  Package tracking developed historically because it provided customers information about the route of a package and the anticipated date and time of delivery. This was important because mail delivery often included multiple carriers in varying environmental circumstances, which made it possible for a mail to get lost.
context_section_description: Mail tracking is made possible through certified mail and registered mail, additional postal services that require the identity of a piece of mail to be recorded during various points of delivery, so that the sender can obtain a proof of delivery and the receiver can predict the time of delivery. 
  The service is provided for an additional charge but recently free service has been introduced as the cost of the associated technology has been decreasing.
  Initially, a piece of mail was identified by the sending date and the addresses of the sender and the recipient; later tracking numbers came to be used for identification. Traceability has been improved even further by barcoding: by non-specific 1D linear barcodes and 2D matrix barcodes and specialized augmented postal codes such as Postal Alpha Numeric Encoding Technique (PLANET), Postal Numeric Encoding Technique (POSTNET) and Intelligent Mail barcode, and other electronic product codes (EPC-s).
caption: A multifunction barcode scanner being used to monitor the transportation of packages of radioactive pharmaceuticals.
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