®

Delivering a Parcel Tracking System for the future

April 23rd 2015

Hersh Shah – Accenture DigitalBob Moran – US Postal Service

Rich Hoggins – Accenture Federal Services

®

The Accenture and Informatica Alliance Advantage

Copyright © 2014 Accenture All rights reserved.

Innovation• Data Quality and Data Management framework compatible with Informatica

• Accenture Innovation Center for Informatica in Bangalore

• Accenture and Informatica have developed assets to accelerate and de‐risk the implementation approach

Collaboration• 15‐year alliance relationship• Regular governance at management and executive levels

• Successful delivery of 1,000+ joint projects, spanning every industry

• Four‐time winner of the Informatica Global Partner of the Year award: 2012, 2010, 2008 and 2007.

Best in class Master Data integration• End to end delivery of highly scalable MDM solutions

• Joint delivery methods for Master Data Management 

• Power and connectivity breadth of Informatica for MDM solutions

• Deployable in the Cloud and on‐premise

Global reach & delivery• Dedicated Informatica practice• 4,900+ Informatica skilled resources globally

• 3,400+ practitioners in Accenture Delivery Centers

• Capability and development plan to rapidly grow Accenture skills

®Accenture Analytics – The Journey to ROI

Part of Accenture DigitalHelping clients: • Manage the digital disruption

• Gain insights from data to help improve performance

• Increase return from data and analytics investments

Relevant data is the starting point for establishing links between data and the insights, actions and outcomes flowing from the data

Copyright © 2014 Accenture All rights reserved.

®

Accenture and Informatica –Delivering a Differentiated Collection of MDM Assets

Data Governance Approach

Big Data Use Cases and Solutions

Delivery Methods for Data Management

Informatica Automation Tools

Proven MDMApproach

Master Data Accelerator

MDM Reference Architecture

Data Integration Factory Solutions

Data Quality Management Services

MDM Diagnostic and Assessment tools

Accenture Alliance Relationship

Informatica Practice and Delivery

Copyright © 2014 Accenture All rights reserved.

®

PTR - Product Tracking and Reporting

®

POST OFFICES PROCESSING CENTERS

VEHICLES EMPLOYEES DELIVERY POINTS

31,000 300+

490,000 153M228,000

PROCESSING EQUIPMENT

8,500

USPS Global FootprintThe U.S. Postal Service delivers 155 billion letters and parcels annually – 40% of the world’s mail!

USPS is self-funded and generates $67bn in revenue each year

®

One of USPS’s strategic goals is grow the parcel business. By 2018, USPS estimates its parcel business to grow to 8 billion pieces per year

Growing the Package Business

• A key part of achieving this growth is 100% product visibility.

• Providing the ability to track mail pieces and containers end-to-end through the Postal network and provide business intelligence to enhance operational performance and provide customer value.

• To get there:• Barcode on every package• 10 – 12 tracking events per piece• Full scan capability across all USPS functions• Scan operations compliance• World-class package tracking and visibility systems

0 1 2 3 4 5

2007

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

Billion Packages Per Year

Today’s presentation will focus on Product Tracking and Reporting – the cornerstone of USPS’s package tracking capability

® Legacy System Challenges

Designed 16 years ago for limited tracking

Unable to add new products and capabilities due to limited system capacity

Primarily batch based system which limited real time data provisioning

Long lag times for commercial shipper visibility extracts

Legacy package tracking system was prone to outages and was unable to scale to meet the parcel growth goals

In 2011 the decision was made to make investments to reengineer and replace the existing system

Legacy system was at end of life

Over $20M annual mandatory spend on Mainframe Infrastructure

Reliability issues

Lengthy outages due to outdated system design

Monolithic architecture was difficult to make changes to in an agile way

® Objectives for PTR

• All scan event data captured and provisioned in near real-time.

• Full product visibility with end-to-end tracking events

• Able to support scan growth of 20% per year

• Maximize system availability and minimize unplanned outages, disruptions.

• Configurable and data driven design, scalable, faster time to market for new products and enhancements.

• Near real-time operational reporting capability

® Our Solution

Informatica used for its core strengths

• Primary integrating technology for inbound and outbound interfaces

• Integration in real-time, not traditional ETL

• Mediation, validation, normalization and rationalization of data

• Parallel threading with the ability to dynamically add and remove processing capacity

• Subsequent “in database” processing occurs using PL/SQL

• All wrapped in a Java execution, orchestration and operations architecture

The Product Tracking and Reporting solution focused on developing a highly scalable and customizable solution to support new products and events.

® Why Informatica?

An integration architecture of massive scale and complexity:

• 210 different interfaces with 51 external systems –“like a heart transplant”

• 300m inbound records per day, and 1bn provisioned outbound

• Extremely tight SLAs on data processing requiring real-time data integration

Proven to USPS:

• Previous success on SASP – a similar system for letter and flat processing

• Already supported in the USPS operations landscape across two major applications

Powercenter provided capabilities out-of-the-box to support this type of effort:

• Prebuilt components to handle different integrating technologies e.g. MQ, flat file, direct DB connection

• Designed to normalize diverse file formats e.g. fixed width, delimited, XML or none of the above!

• Facility to share and re-use components across interfaces e.g. tracking barcode parsing

• Ability to scale both horizontally and vertically to support the high throughput requirements

® How Accenture Helped?

• Informatica ETL expertise

• High performance data architects

• Global Postal industry knowledge

• Track record of delivering package tracking programs throughout the world

• Future-proofed architecture for online needs as well as real-time reporting

• USPS infrastructure expertise

Accenture was the prime system integrator with responsibility for application design and development, technical architecture, and testing services.

Working with the United States Federal Government, Accenture Federal Services delivers mission critical operations to every cabinet level agency and 24 of the largest federal organizations

®

CDM SV PostalOne! SASP FAST GBS IM-VIS PTR

VisibilitySystems

Business Capabilities

Mail Parcel

Accenture & USPS PartnershipAccenture has partnered with USPS to develop the foundational systems necessary to drive high performing Mail and Parcel Visibility

® Results Delivered

Improved Customer Satisfaction• Attained a holiday season without any unplanned outages• Immediately eliminated 13 hours of mandatory down time per week• Designed for zero down time deployments for online application

Increased & Enhanced Visibility• Immediately increase in number of available visibility events (8 to 11)• Enabled real-time service measurement enhanced visibility data • Improved interfaces for IVR, Customer Care, and Claims

System Performance• Supports peak 110M online lookups/day, peak rate of 1,800 / sec – 200% increase• 50% increase in scan volume on the prior year – 310M/day 3B/year• Customer extracts of visibility events time with cut by 66%

Cost Reduction• Eliminated $20M in mandatory annualized cost

Extensible for the Future• Established the platform for Sunday Amazon Delivery• Established the platform for Text Tracking• Established the platform for MyUSPS

Parcel volume grew by 14% during the 2014 Holiday Season!

PTR delivered on high customer satisfaction through eliminating holiday outages and improved system throughput.

® What’s Next?

Real-time Text Message Tracking• PTR is now provisioning tracking data

through text messages.

Sunday Delivery• Continuing to expand 7 day a week

delivery to more locations

Amazon Fresh• Partnering with Amazon for grocery

delivery

Real-time Operations mobile reporting• Provisioning of real-time reporting to

operations managers on mobile devices

Predictive Delivery Day and Window• Ability to accurately predict the day a

package will arrive and provide the customer a 2 hour delivery window

GPS tracking data• Ability to tie geo-location data to delivery

and route information

PTR laid the foundation for the future to expand to real-time parcel tracking through

®