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The boom of global online shopping has led to an explosive growth in parcel and post delivery business.
One of the national postal services has come across a problem of integrating new services into outdated software — launching new digital products became impossible.
It was necessary to redesign whole the system for registration and acceptance of parcels and postand migrate to a web version. This was resolved by ICL Services which came up with a solution that meets all modern requirements: personal accounts for the national post employees who deal with receiving parcels and post now can help them launch new products into the market fast.
Parcels from various customers (online stores, retail chains, enterprises, government agencies, etc.) are sent by batches consisting of tens and hundreds of thousands of items. Specialized software is used by postal services to process these batches: for verifying listings, checking dimensions, weight, address and calculating tariffs. However, the software used by the postal service employees hindered them to perform better. It required much effort to revise and update and was too complex to integrate with new products and services.
It was necessary to significantly speed up parcel and post items processing and registration by cutting down on staff involved and letting them to perform better.
It was essential to have an interface transforming complex process into elementary one..
The solution development started in 2016.
The boom of global online shopping has led to an explosive growth in parcel and post delivery business.
One of the national postal services has come across a problem of integrating new services into outdated software — launching new digital products became impossible.
It was necessary to redesign whole the system for registration and acceptance of parcels and postand migrate to a web version. This was resolved by ICL Services which came up with a solution that meets all modern requirements: personal accounts for the national post employees who deal with receiving parcels and post now can help them launch new products into the market fast.
Parcels from various customers (online stores, retail chains, enterprises, government agencies, etc.) are sent by batches consisting of tens and hundreds of thousands of items. Specialized software is used by postal services to process these batches: for verifying listings, checking dimensions, weight, address and calculating tariffs. However, the software used by the postal service employees hindered them to perform better. It required much effort to revise and update and was too complex to integrate with new products and services.
It was necessary to significantly speed up parcel and post items processing and registration by cutting down on staff involved and letting them to perform better.
It was essential to have an interface transforming complex process into elementary one..
The solution development started in 2016.
Key Challenges
- Redesigning the current system of registration and acceptance of parcel and post items and migrating it to WEB
- Speeding up mail registration and processing
- Cutting down on staff involved in the process and improving their performance
Solution
Implemented our solution
- Integration with dozens of systems and indexes of hundreds of thousands of items.
In collaboration with the customer, the concept and design of the new personal account system for postal service staff were developed by ICL Services.
Owing to the customer’s active involvement, the first prototype illustrating parcel reception was presented in the shortest possible time. After that, further processing logic was developed by UX/UI-team.
Development was conducted according to the agile methodology. Demonstration of functionality took place regularly with an active involvement of representatives from the customer.
Due to the short release cycle, it was necessary to constantly adapt to the changing customer requirements. Incompatibility with a large number of other systems also caused difficulties. For example, accepting an item at the post office required integration with a couple of dozen information systems and data bases.
The software architecture used did not meet new requirements: initially, lists were assumed to contain up to 300 items, whereas today’s lots often consist of tens of thousands of items. Maximum scalability was ensured by implementing microservice architecture — a set of relatively small service units that can function independently of each other. Each service has its own independent release cycle. During the testing process, a single microservice could be fixed and updated without altering the entire product. This also provided flexibility of calculating performance distribution in data centre processing.
The first version of the operator’s personal account was launched in test mode three months later. After that, the work began on expanding the functionality and integrating the personal account with other systems. - Operator’s personal account.
The main thing of the operator’s personal account is The Reception Module. After logging in, , opens the reception window and starts scanning the list of items. The operator is able to observe the scanning process, cancel any item, adjust weight and dimensions and specify tariffs.
The Administrator Module helps to monitor operators’ performance and a separate integration module simplifies work with large enterprise customers by allowing them to login to the system directly.
Each month, the service is growing by 10% in terms of the volume of received items. A quarter of all letters and a half of parcels — aprox. 10 million a month — are now being processed with the system developed by ICL Services.
Outdated software has now been completely replaced by the new system.
While the ICL Services team devotes part of their time to supporting the existing service, the majority of effort (85% of the time) is put into developing new functions and products, taking just a few weeks to implement them. Previously, updating the software and adding new features could take up to six months.
Among the new functions are direct integration with the sender’s new personal account and the customer systems, concurrent work of several operators with one list, support for more than 50 types of mail items.
Products and technologies
- The web client was developed with the use of React.js and Redux
- The server part is built on Linux, Puppet is used to manage the servers
- Data is stored in PostgreSQL
- Microservices are written in Java. Spring Boot and Akka are used
- Interservice integration is implemented using Rest API and Kafka
Results
- As a result, the ICL Services team has developed an user-friendly and flexible solution that is easy to maintain and integrate with new systems. Due to the fact that all processes have been analysed, designed and implemented, operators are making fewer mistakes and spend less time on processing items.
- The new software is available on all types of production facilities of the postal service: from ordinary post offices with a throughput of several thousand items a month to international sorting centres which process hundreds of thousands of mail items per month.
- Postal operator services have become more attractive and convenient for customers.
- The operator’s expenses on post and parcel processing have been cut by several times.