News & Info, News, Cloud Solutions in the News, Business Analytics and Big data in the News
The CIO of An Post John Cronin reveals how investment in business intelligence is leading to the postal network’s foray into internet of things. “Big data is a vital part of our future,” says John Cronin, CIO of Ireland’s postal network An Post, who is driving a variety of business intelligence, big data and internet of things strategies to transform postal delivery in Ireland. It will come as a surprise to many who read this that the largest user of big data in Ireland today is An Post. An Post serves more than 1.7m customers every week through a network of over 1,130 post offices as well as 2,000 PostPoint payment points at newsagents and supermarkets across the country. It is Cronin’s job to ensure not only that letters and parcels arrive in the right places at the right time, but also to ensure that transactions ranging from paying bills, debit card transactions to ordering foreign currency all happens securely and instantly. Foremost among Cronin’s strategies is transforming the existing postal service to serve tech-savvy consumers of the 21st century through innovative new services. This will only be possible by embracing big data. ‘The value of big data for us is we have created a system that frees people up to make business decisions, to innovate and create new ways to develop An Post’ – JOHN CRONIN, AN POST To make this happen, An Post has implemented several Oracle technologies as part of its digital transformation strategy. This includes Oracle’s business intelligence suite foundation Edition, which provides same-day view of cash flow through an easy-to-use dashboard. The postal network will also...
News & Info, News, Cloud Solutions in the News, Business Analytics and Big data in the News
With physical mail in decline, postal services like An Post seem poised to become the digital age’s version of a buggy maker. But instead, Ireland’s national postal service is fighting fire with fire by using the very technologies threatening to supplant it to support a remarkable transformation. Leveraging the largest electronic network in the country and in excess of 1,100 retail locations (aka post offices), An Post has morphed into a service aggregator. The organization has diversified into a wide array of services from banking and credit cards to gift cards and bill payments. Customers can get a dog license, pay a parking fine, buy a gift card, and make a bank deposit, all at the same counter. It has grabbed nearly 40% of Ireland’s market for foreign exchange services since An Post launched the service four years ago. Combined with a service-wide cost efficiency program, the overhaul has paid off, as the An Post Group turned 2013’s €11.5 million operating loss into a €5.9 million operating profit for 2014. As a services intermediary, however, An Post is generating millions of new individual transactions from retail customers and partners, straining its existing IT infrastructure. Additional nightly feeds from internal systems like finance, HR, and payroll are adding even more data, further taxing system performance. On top of that, the company wanted to analyze some data in real time in order to prevent fraud, ensure system performance wasn’t degrading, and provide feeds to executive dashboards. The old platform just couldn’t keep up. “This is big, big data,” says John Cronin, Group CIO, Group Technology Solutions at An Post. “We...
News, Cloud Solutions in the News, Business Analytics and Big data in the News
Centralised information An Post has gone from a situation 5 years ago which consisted of distributed, uncoordinated information in spreadsheets, to a centralised highly connected data warehouse that facilitates dashboards and analytics and near real-time insights to guide the business, reports John Cronin, CIO. With various Oracle installations through the business, there was already a level of familiarity and comfort, reports Cronin, but when the decision was made to look for a data warehouse solution, there was a still competitive process. Oracle was chosen after six months of discussion, said Cronin. There had been Oracle databases in An Post for many years, he says, running systems and services such as the state savings bank system, mybills.ie and the fixed penalty notice system with the Gardaí. The Oracle GoldenGate system was chosen and implemented. GoldenGate is a comprehensive software package for real-time data integration and replication in heterogeneous IT environments. Small test Mail operations were included in the first phase roll out, followed by payroll in phase two. For an organisation of some 1,130 post offices, 2,000 service outlets and more than 10,000 employees, this was no small test of the system. Cronin reports that there were immediate results with efficiencies around mail route planning, working hours, sorting for efficient delivery etc., that allowed An Post to make the best of the resources available. Labour and input for the system has reduced by 17%, while it has facilitated next day delivery rates going from 72% to in excess of 98%. There are also significant savings when considering total cost of ownership. The dedicated Oracle infrastructure saw two ExaData boxes replace...
