Postal Services

Postal Services

Using data to optimise services and maximize profits

Our client offers postal services in the UK and abroad. The market for parcels is becoming highly competitive, and they started to lag behind and lose market share. In order to retain customers and increase market share, they needed to improve their offerings and adjust pricing. Their first step was to invest in a new parcel product and tracking system to replace their existing legacy systems. Once this was done, they needed to gain insights from the massive amounts of data that was generated.

They engaged with a number of external suppliers. We were hired to provide specialist and impartial business intelligence advice, devise the BI strategy, to manage suppliers and ensure successful implementation.

The highly profitable solution was delivered using an agile methodology:

1. Analytics Strategy – Created a BI strategy and implementation approach. The business didn’t have a clear strategy to leverage the data and generate insights to understand where operational inefficiencies were occurring in their pipeline, as well as track the commercial success of the products.
2. User requirements and analysis – Defined the business questions, decisions and business rules that were needed to analyse the data being generated.
3. Design of dashboards – Worked with stakeholders through the design process of how data would be visually presented to the business functions.
4. Iterative build sprints – As product owner worked with development resources to ensure functionality was delivered in priority order presenting new functions to the business at the end of each sprint activity.
5. Testing – Planned and managed the user acceptance testing of new dashboards.
6. Implementation – Supported the implementation of the new analytics capability to the operations and commercial business units.

Benefits:

• Operational cost savings / Improved routing efficiency – analysing performance of parcel pipeline led to optimisation of workforce based on the work load / volume of parcels at different times of day. Removing guesswork by using data to make effective planning decisions.
• Improved communications – customer can interact to change destination of parcel or time of delivery or to request early delivery (based on lifestyle).
• Increase in cross-selling, up-selling / Improved sales performance – seeing the portfolio of products in one view provided the sales team with the understanding of customer needs in granular detail and enables targeted offerings of new services and products.
• Improve performance of workforce – managers monitor staff performance via dashboard which enables better allocation of resources
• Know your customer / monitor profitability of the customer – combining data sources for single truth enables better decisions around which customers to retain, allowable churn, and informs different propositions for different segments of the market.
• Optimise services and maximize profits across the group (different businesses) – Our client owns several businesses which are all part of the group. Combining and analysing data provided clear picture of what service is best offered by which business. This optimised services for their customer and maximised profits for our client.
• Forecast investments through different scenarios – Analysing data provides information of different scenarios for introducing new products and how they impact existing services.
• Identifying revenue leakages – Customer pays for the exact number of items not for the amount that was advised