Oracle Customer Success—An Post

An Post Boosts Retail and Postal Services with Big Data and Analytics Platform

With our Oracle solution for Big Data and Analytics we now have an analytics platform that has completely transformed our service delivery model. It provides An Post with a single source of truth while automatically consolidating data from all post offices nationwide.

— John Cronin, Group Chief Information Officer, An Post Limited

An Post is Ireland’s national postal service and one of the country’s largest companies, providing a wide range of postal, distribution, communication, retail, and financial services. Every day, An Post staff collect, process, and deliver more than 2.5 million items of mail to 2.2 million business and residential addresses, using a road fleet of 2,738 vehicles and 1,645 bicycles. In addition, every week it serves 1.7 million customers through its unique national network of 1,100 post offices and more than 2,000 PostPoint payment channels at retail outlets nationwide.

An Post also delivers agency services for government departments, the National Treasury Management Agency, and many other commercial bodies including banks, and holds more than US$19 billion in state savings deposits.

Business Challenge

Provide a scalable big data and analytics platform to manage millions of daily transactions, facilitate new postal services, and align with market needs and the growth in post office retail services—such as foreign exchange services, which have grown from zero to almost 40% national market share in less than four years
Enhance management reporting across operations, human resources (HR), and finance, and provide easy-access analytics for post office retail and other business areas to enable real-time detailed insight across the business

Reduce administration time and costs with rapid database provisioning and greater consolidation of financial data from 1,100 post offices and hundreds of source systems across the country
Reduce time to market for new retail and postal services, and provide faster and more valuable service offerings to citizens from parcel delivery options to payment services

Deployed a big data and analytics platform using Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Advanced Analytics, and Oracle Database 12c innovations including Oracle Multitenant, to reduce time to value on the company’s data capital, combat fraud, and enable readily-available enterprisewide business analytics to define, monitor, and drive business improvements within core areas such as mails, parcels, and retail
Delivered real-time overview of An Post’s entire operations by enabling automatic consolidation of data from the largest electronic network in Ireland, involving millions of daily transactions from 1,100 post offices including retail purchases such as stamps, gift vouchers, and lottery cards, energy and mobile phone bill payments, and foreign exchange transactions

Enabled An Post to rapidly analyze and respond to an evolving market, using Oracle Advanced Analytics’ powerful in-database data mining and predictive analytics machine learning algorithms to increase the value of its customer service offerings—for example, providing parcel recipients with four convenient delivery options and instant customer messaging when a parcel is delivered, enabling citizens to pay court fines through post office channels, and offering pre-paid gas cards to help citizens better manage energy consumption
Used Oracle Exadata’s powerful database engine to reduce extract-transform-load (ETL) times with Oracle Golden Gate by 60% straight out of the box, and by 90% with Oracle Database 12c and Oracle Data Integrator optimizations, reducing batch processing from 11 hours to 34 minutes and ensuring that up-to-date data is always available at the start of the each day
Enabled An Post to produce monthly financial results in minutes rather than weeks and automatically run weekly cash accounts at the touch of a button instead of spending hours consolidating data from numerous source systems
Optimized cash management by delivering same-day analytics on easy-to-use dashboards and minimized fraud thanks to real-time alerts of suspicious cash transaction activity, enabled by leveraging the power of Oracle Exadata and Oracle Database 12c for running Oracle Advanced Analytics
Gained the ability to launch new postal and retail services almost immediately, as IT staff can now provision databases in minutes instead of days and manage many databases as one using Oracle Multitenant on Oracle Exadata
Minimized infrastructure and management costs by deploying a hybrid cloud solution—including a managed-service private cloud for the big data and analytics platform, and a public cloud using Oracle Database Backup Cloud Service as a secure, scalable, and protected platform-as-a-service (PaaS)—reducing on-premise storage by 12 terabytes and significantly decreasing IT total cost of ownership
Enabled rapid delivery of consolidated HR data for more than 9,000 employees—including payroll data and workforce analytics such as postal operative productivity—thus eliminating thousands of spreadsheets thanks to a single source of truth, enabling optimization of manpower, and allowing postal officers to receive performance data on Monday morning regarding their previous week’s activities
Provided the capability to easily manage the annual 2 billion internal transaction messages, and enabled unlimited scalability to manage increasing amounts of data via structured feeds from numerous databases and to capitalize on unstructured data in retail and operations, for example, photographs for assessing post office refurbishing requirements
Anticipated a return on investment within four years, thanks to reduced administration efforts across the enterprise, improved cash management, and optimized workforce

We always look first to Oracle for all our IT needs because its products cover the complete stack. Only Oracle Exadata, running Oracle Database 12c innovations such as Oracle Multitenant, is able to fulfill the needs of our incredibly data-driven business handling millions of daily transactions.

— John Cronin, Group Chief Information Officer, An Post Limited

About An Post

Headquarters

Dublin, Ireland

Employees

10,500

Annual Revenue

$500 Million to $1 Billion

An Post

Partners

An Post initially engaged Oracle Partner Vertice to deliver some immediate support and enhancements to the existing business intelligence solution. For the big data and analytics platform, Vertice provided expert services including advisory, architectural, and in-depth product and data mining expertise, in addition to implementation, support, and training services. The new architecture now aligns fully with the Oracle Big Data – Data Warehouse reference architecture.

“Vertice provided and continue to provide us with a great service, representing Oracle extremely well. I have nothing but the highest respect for Vertice’s consultants, with whom I have worked successfully for several years,” Cronin said.