CGI took on Itella’s challenges and delivered a powerful, customized point-of-sale (POS) system that will keep pace with its continued business growth and rapidly changing business environment. We integrated our own POS solution with a custom postal sales support system that, together, meet all of Itella’s unique business requirements.
Itella Corporation offers postal, financial administration and logistics services. It is owned by the Finnish government and headquartered in Pohjois-Pasila, Helsinki.
Every day, tens of thousands of Finnish people pick up their shipments from post service outlets. With the explosion in online shopping, there has been a sharp increase in the number of parcels sent and delivered every day. More than 1.5 million shipments were picked up and 48,000 electronic acknowledgements written during the 2013 Christmas holidays alone.
The challenge
Itella was dealing with a complicated pricing structure and the management of a multitude of products, prices and campaigns. It wanted to tackle these issues, as well as improve it efficiencies and the customer experience. To meet its objectives, Itella decided to implement an innovative chain store system customized to address its needs.
The system had to be built with an open architecture to enable multivendor operations and continuous development. Itella also wanted to replace an old clarification, scanning and digitization process for archiving documents that was unreliable, ineffective and expensive.
How CGI helped
Itella selected CGI to meet its automation and implementation goals. It worked directly with CGI to design a modern and controlled chain store system that takes into account special features of the postal industry.
CGI began by automating manual processes either partially or fully. For instance, legacy manual acknowledgement processes were replaced with automated acknowledgements and electronic signatures.
CGI deployed a POS system based on our own PosManager system and a custom application for postal sales support. Both were integrated with SAP, track and trace, and mobile systems.
Itella now has all functionality it needs to sell and deliver postal services, as well as traditional retail goods, including a powerful centralized system for pricing, campaigns and assortment management.
“The new system integrates many of our core business functions, and we are therefore able to handle the constant growth of parcel traffic.”
Jukka Rosenberg, Mail Communications Director, Itella
The results
Itella quickly began realizing the benefits of the new system. Specifically, it achieved dramatic cost savings by shifting to an automated and fully electronic process for postal shipment acknowledgement. Additional benefits include the following:
- New, easy-to-use functionality that support postal services and product-related functions at all outlets and greatly improves user satisfaction
- Increased customer satisfaction through faster and better customer service and full support for the corporate track and trace system
- Fast outlet application that results in shorter queues and higher sales volumes
- Automated handling of shipment and additional services pricing
- Centralized control for promotions, pricing and assortment management
- Integrated, yet independent POS and postal support application, offering freedom of choice and the ability to handle future technology demands with respect to supplier selection
The bottomline: Itella’s implemenation of a seamlessly integrated custom postal sales support system with CGI’s commercial IP POS system has proven to be a cost-saving, customer pleasing, and ultimately innovative endeavor.
“There are already more than 5,000,000 electronic acknowledgements written in our service outlet network.”
Hannu Kolmonen, Development Manager, Itella
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