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Case Study

How a Postal Service Provider Modernized To Offer Competitive and Agile New Services

Leading mail, parcel, and e-commerce logistics company in need of digitization to remain competitive.

Postal services are at a turning point. They need to adapt in order to remain relevant, competing with digitally native companies in different areas of their product portfolio.
To be able to compete effectively, they have to speed up the digitization of their products.

This means that postal operators that have not yet fully digitized, need to do so urgently, or risk being excluded as digital service providers for e-government, e-commerce, and e-finance services.

This company is one of the leading mail, parcel and e-commerce corporations in Europe. In a typical day it will deliver 675,000 parcels and up to 8 million letters and offers tailor-made logistic solutions for businesses and households.

The company’s leaders recognized that competition for their customers was growing fiercer—and that competitors were increasingly digitized.

Challenge

This company had been the only provider for mailing and package delivery services in its home country, and like many other postal companies, it offered just one pricing model, by weight.

With the rise of e-commerce, and the new buying patterns associated with it, it was time for new pricing and business models to be considered.

The company’s own technology platform had not been updated in many years, as it had not felt pressure to invest in new infrastructure that could support future new business models.

Company leaders now wanted to rethink the IT infrastructure and build a more versatile platform for new services and business models.

Challenges in short:

The introduction of new business models and services was limited.

The rise of new e-commerce drove need for business model innovation.

Legacy technology platforms and IT infrastructure required modernization.

Solution

All parcels shipped through the company carry a unique barcode that provides detailed information on the parcel’s content and whereabouts. Every parcel is scanned multiple times on its journey, with each scan representing a discrete "event".

The company uses the DigitalRoute Usage Engine to collect these and other digital events generated at each scan (temperature, weight, location, humidity and more), and bind them to the sender and recipient. As a result, the company now has much deeper visibility into its supply chain and the ability to respond to events in real time.

The new event collection capabilities and the new models they’ll enable, generate vast amounts of data, much more than the company has had to manage before.

An added benefit of the new system: the company can also now immediately detect and prevent fraudulent behaviour in its supply chain, such as duplicate use of the same barcode.

Outcome

With more accurate, fine-grained session-handling processes, the company can run its business much more effectively and stay ahead of digital competitors.

They can now implement a wide range of consumption-based pricing models and prevent revenue leakage from fraud.

With the Usage Engine providing full transparency into the journey of every package, the company now enjoys a higher level of trust from customers—which in turn leads to increased loyalty.

With the ability to provide transparent insights into the status of packages during transport, the company can now support a wide range of new business models.

Outcome in short:

Wider range of consumption-based pricing models enabled.

Full transparency of parcel journey provides increased customer loyalty.

Prevention of fraudulent behavior in the supply chain.

New insights to empower additional new business models and services.

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