Postnord
The start of a strategic partnership
Postnord is the leading supplier of communication and logistics solutions in the Nordic region, and provider of postal services to private households and corporate organizations in Sweden and Denmark. Their network is made up of over 8 000 distribution points in the Nordics of which 2 200 operate in Sweden.
Having delivered 2.6 billion letters and mailings, and 198 million packages in 2020 alone, Postnord is established as a trusted postal service provider, and they continue to nurture a strong, forward looking goal; to become the best logistics, communications, and ecommerce company in the Nordics.
“TIQQE has injected the right competence and culture to our team. Together we have transformed to a new way of working, constantly examining the results and adjusting the course and have found the fastest and cheapest way of accessing new technology”
The challenge
Prior to the partnership, Postnord had four different production systems for postal agents in every one of the Nordic countries, with each having its own country-specific solutions. This setup was not only inefficient and costly; it also lacked the scalability needed to accommodate the apparent growing demand for delivery services.
The situation was also urgent in Sweden and Denmark. The agent’s hardware setup for the Swedish production system was approaching end-of-life, while hardware agreements in the Denmark system have already expired, necessitating some manual work in parcel handling on the part of the agents. This called for immediate modernization measures.
Working together with the digital transformation process, both parties immediately identified what was needed for Postnord to move forward; transforming their monolithic legacy systems into an integrated, flexible, and efficient production model that could keep up with the expanding product portfolio and the burgeoning consumer demand for delivery services.
The solution and results
The Postnord-TIQQE collaboration is still a work in progress. Most efforts have been directed towards refactoring the old system and working on the main logistics core system, as the immediate target is coping with their hardware end-of-life by the end of 2019.
To date, however, Postnord has already released their services through 400 phones to 400 agents as a supplement to the current hardware setup, as a result of our joint efforts. Note that this is only a complement to the existing solutions, and not a complete replacement yet.
But even with the new system that is yet to be completed, the effects have already been evident and immediate:
• Scalability and elasticity. The platform has moved to a cloud environment (AWS serverless architecture) where resources are elastic, enabling them to instantly grow or shrink as needed.
• Cost optimization. By allowing them the flexibility of scaling up or down, costs are also radically reduced as they would only need to pay for what they use. Postnord has also lowered its development costs by 60% with DevOps.
• Development and operational excellence. DevOps offered an alternative yet faster way of delivery, with higher quality output, and the ability to scale up the deployment over multiple autonomous teams.
• Testability. With the AWS serverless architecture, PostNord created a world where development and tests were not hardware-constrained.
• Observability. It’s easier to perceive any changes in the system’s behavior by using automatic alarms, monitoring of infrastructure, as well as utilizing cloud economics.
• Reduced time-to-market. There is a significantly greater number of functional updates and new services to end-customers.
• Decreased release cycles. New services and updates are released every day instead of every 6 months.
• Ability to implement new business models faster. There is no limit to the products and services they can introduce—activate new types of agents, download packages in store, and more, all accessible through a phone.
This combined work has allowed Postnord to scale greater heights in how they can innovate in the delivery and logistics space, with the aim of providing a better experience and unparalleled service to their customers and employees. They’re not just mailing it in.
