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Department of Post

Postal Service Lowers Total Cost of Ownership, Gains Better Analysis

Tools, Higher Availability

India Post provides mail, financial services and premium offerings including courier and bankingto its customers throughout India. For the effectiveness and efficiency of its high-quality postal

services, it wanted to eliminate several issues with availability, performance as well as costs. For

these reasons, the department migrated from Oracle 10g database to a new infrastructure based

on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 data management software. As a result, India Post has lowered

the total cost of ownership by 63 percent, and boosted scalability and availability of the solution.

Whats more, the in-built business intelligence tools, allow the Postal Department to create

meaningful dashboard and reports.

http://www.indiapost.gov.in/http://www.indiapost.gov.in/

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Situation

The Department of Posts functioning under the brand name India Post, is a government operated postal

system in India; it is generally referred to within India as 'the post office'. The Indian Postal Service, with

155,333 post offices, is the most widely distributed post office system in the world. With a far-flung reach

and its presence in remote areas, the Indian postal service is also involved in other services such as

ePayment and Speed Post.

ePayment is a comprehensive bill payment service offered by India Post to help meet the needs of the

customers providing a convenient and trusted electronic bill payment facility. This allows collection of bills

(telephone bills, electricity bills, university fee, school fee, insurance premium etc.) on behalf of any

organization.

Speed Post is the market leader in the domestic express industry and provides time-bound and express

delivery of letters, documents and parcels across the nation and around the world. India Post has launched

Speed Net, an online tracking service for its speed post consignments. It captures all data related to

packages including collection, movement, and delivery details. The service allows customers to track the

delivery status of their packages online.

Until recently, the database environment for these services was based on Oracle 10g. However, Oracle

support had to be renewed every year by paying a huge amount. Also, for all BI and reporting needs,

additional components and tools were required to be purchased. Because of the exorbitant cost of licensing

SQL Server provides

all that we need in

terms of high

performance,

reliability, availability

and ease of

management. In all,

we have been able to

reduce the total cost of

ownership by 63

percent while

increasing

performance and

availability of the

solutions.

Balasubramanian

KaDirectorCEPT Mysore,

Department of Post

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of the product and to have uniformity for maintenance, the Department thought to migrate to a different

database management system altogether.

Hence, for the support and delivery of the high-quality and modern postal services, India Post decided to

move to Microsoft SQL Server, which was a familiar product to them and many of the applications were

running with it already.

Solution

After careful evaluation, India Post decided to migrate the services to Microsoft SQL Server 2008, a fully

supported, highly secure database solution. In comparison to Oracle 10g, Microsoft was a more cost-

effective solution and it comes with the Business Intelligence tools that we needed, says Balasubramanian

Ka, Director, CEPT Mysore, Department of Post. It was easy to implement and was the best fit for our

needs.

ePayment Solution

The bill payment collections for the day are stored on a local server at each post office. At the end of the

day, the data is consolidated electronically at the data center using a message queue service specifically

developed for by DoP for the ePayment application. The next day, the information from across the country isanalyzed at its data center in Mysore by DoP before making payments to the service providers. The service

providers can get the details of collection and payment through email or by logging into the ePayment

website of the DoP.

SpeedNet Application

As a package is delivered to a post office by a customer, the information is first stored in a local client-

server application. This is because connectivity is often an issue, especially at remote locations. Thereafter,

the data is transferred to the centralized application residing at the DoP data center at Mysore. Once the

information is available in the SpeedNet, it is exposed as a tracking service online on India Post website.

Customers can track the status on the package using the 13-character Article number given to them at the

post office. In addition, the customers can receive the stats over SMS on their mobile phone by sending an

SMS to 55352.

With the implementation of the new database environment, both ePayment and Speed Post services are now

centralized and application availability has increased. Additionally, SQL Server 2008 simplifies overall

database management, which leads to improved operational efficiency and better system performance. For

the first time users have a single consistent view of business information.

The complete data of both the applications is now available at the Department of Posts data center.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 provides a scalable Business Intelligence platform optimized for data integration,

reporting, and analysis, enabling India Post to deliver intelligence where users want it. The platform includes

best of breed data integration capabilities through SQL Server Integration Services; reporting capabilities

through SQL Server Reporting Services and Multidimensional OLAP capabilities through SQL Server Analysis

Services. The solution meets our needs for high availability, self-service reporting, and enhanced analysis

capabilities, says Balasubramanian.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services introduces new features and enhancements that help users

create reports and make those reports more comprehensive. Apart from just KPI based reports, the service

provides a complete server-based platform designed to support a wide variety of reporting needs such as

calculating the total transit time, number of articles not delivered etc. As employees have access to drill

down into these reports, they have the insight to take better business decisions.

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Additionally, the solution provides a scalable enterprise data-integration platform that enables the

department to easily manage data from all the services.

With SQL Server 2008, India Post has improved operational efficiency. The solution is helping to avoid costs,

improve application performance, and help ensure efficient delivery of services.

Benefits

By moving its database infrastructure from Oracle 10g to SQL Server 2008, India Post is seeing significant

improvement in availability, and reliability of the application. In addition, skilled resources are easily

available to maintain the application.

Improved Package Tracking

The solution provides transparency on all package transactions. It allows customers to track the movement

as well as the delivery status of parcels and consignments online. As we move forward, it was extremely

vital that all our customers can monitor the progress of their consignments, says Balasubramanian. The

new database environment helps them to do so more effectively and accurately.

Lowers Total Cost of Ownership by 63 Percent

SQL Server provides all that we need in terms of high performance, reliability, availability and ease of

management, says Balasubramanian. He continues, The initial cost of acquisition of SQL Server, followed

by availability of skills to develop, deploy and manage the solution helps DoP to lower costs significantly. In

all, we have been able to reduce the total cost of ownership by 63 percent while increasing performance and

availability of the solutions.

Boost in Customer Satisfaction

The centralization of the services has improved customer satisfaction to a great extent. Customers report

that they are happy with the improved level of service, which is not only easy to use but also provides

accurate data.

Better Analytical Tools

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 helps DoP to build a comprehensive, enterprise-scale analytics solution that

delivers actionable insights through familiar tools. The solution automatically generates monthly analysis

that helps employees to access updated information. The integrated infrastructure will help the department

to meet its business growth for the future.