“Portaltech have been great partners for us over the past three years and have brought a wealth of knowledge to our consumer projects. We regard them very highly”

Dennis Greene, Head of eBusiness, The Royal Mail Group

Today’s postal marketplace is a highly competitive one and there is a constant need to keep up with evolving technologies and online services. Combined with requests from online retailers and C2C businesses looking to provide their customers with simple and easy integrated shipping solutions, Royal Mail saw the need to take the humble stamp online and build a web based postage service.

However in January 2004, Royal Mail launched a desktop based application for small businesses called SmartStamp® that allowed customers to print labels incorporating a postage stamp directly from their own computer. In the subsequent year there were over 11 million SmartStamp mailings and 13,500 small businesses using the service.

The Brief:

Lockheed Martin has a strategic partnership with the Royal Mail Group to modernise and automate its entire delivery network. An essential aspect of which is the incorporation of e-procurement and e-fulfilment into the overall delivery network.

The Royal Mail Group and Lockheed Martin came to Portaltech because they wanted:

1)   A scalable and flexible system. With a million items of postage every day in the UK ,  The Royal Mail Group needed a platform and system that could cope with a large number of transactions.

2)   An application whereby Royal Mail customers could purchase and print stamps through the Royal Mail’s online customer portal website. This application would also have to handle other related aspects of online postage, such as billing, online label generation, refunding and fraud prevention.

3)   A supporting web service that could be accessed directly by third party companies. This would allow businesses to build this service seamlessly into their own websites and so provide their customers with an integrated postage solution.

The Solution:

The greatest challenge facing the project was to aggregate a number of existing, disparate systems in order to provide a single interface to which such an application could “plug into” and to which third party businesses could access directly.

The project team worked together to:

• Integrate various systems in order to provide all functions required to generate an online stamp, from image generation and billing through to tracking and fraud prevention.
• Design a web service interface which exposed all the relevant functions required by the online stamp process and with which any third party could communicate.
• Design, develop and integrate a web application within the portal environment to provide a compelling customer experience and interface with the web service.
• Re-purpose systems to handle the stamp generation, label rendering capabilities and revenue detection systems, and expose these to other third party systems.
• Build a highly configurable system that was capable of funnelling the load to existing systems in the case of spikes in demand.
• Build a system that could log efficiently all incoming and outgoing data with minimal impact on high performance requirements.
• Ensure the service was scalable at all levels to handle the high potential volume loads.

Measurable benefits since launch:

• Delivered on time and to budget, with millions of satisfied customers.
• The initial launch was so successful that the revenue generated through the eBay / Royal Mail integration, outstripped the existing Royal Mail site, opening up a business strategy to develop more third party relationships.
• Portaltech continues to work with the Royal Mail in the advancement and implementation of their third party partners and online postage capabilities.

www.royalmail.com