Tech overhaul to ensure Australian Post network doesn’t fail

Australia Post is giving its communications network an overhaul to improve customer service

Australia Post CIO John Cox. Picture: Aaron Francis

Australia Post is giving its core communications network a ma­jor overhaul, promising to arm its frontline workers with the best possible technology and multiple backups to ensure services never go down.

With more than 4000 sites to be upgraded, Australia Post is wor­king with Telstra, Brisbane-based enterprise communicat­ions provider Comscentre, NBN Co and contact centre services provider ENGAGE on the multimillion-dollar project.

Australia Post’s chief information officer, John Cox, said a robust communications backbone was crucial in delivering the next generation of digital services.

“Every staff member, whether at the post office, on a bike or on a delivery vehicle, will all be on the same communications platform for the first time ever,” he said.

“We are replacing five different scanner platforms with the one scanner platform, rolling out devices across the network; it’s a fundamental change that sets us up for the future.”

As parcel delivery accounts for a big chunk of Australia Post’s revenue, Mr Cox said staff at the post offices need to be equipped with the best possible tools.

“The world is going digital and, as mail declines, the parcels business is growing and a lot of small businesses go to the post office to lodge their parcels.

“Transactions are still a huge part of what we do and taking away the friction for our frontline staff is really important, so they can focus more on the consumer experience.”

Mr Cox, a former senior IT executive at NAB Bank, joined Australia Post in 2016.

“My brief was to modernise the back end,” he said. “A lot of work had been done on the digital front end and we’ve been pushing to shift from legacy processes at the core, which is always harder.”

Building better redundancy is central to the overhaul, especially as more services go digital.

“Each site will have multiple connection points, so if any particular link fails the services will automatically switch over to an alternative link,” Mr Cox said.

“We have a lot of cameras in the sites. There’s a lot of imaging technology used with parcels and use of applications like handwriting recognition.

“There’s a lot of data coming in and out of our facilities that goes to our data centre and then into the cloud.”

Comscentre will manage the process for Australia Post using the National Broadband Network to provision the wholesale business-grade services. Meanwhile, Telstra is also playing a role in ensuring services stay online.

“We are restructuring our mobile deal with them as they get ready with their 5G network,” Mr Cox said. “They are also working with us on a redundancy plan for our sites, providing 4G backup for our networks and also giving all of our sites access to facilities like videoconferencing.”

The upgrade will also result in Australia Post consolidating its contact centre operations, with US company ENGAGE doing the heavy lifting.

“Bringing everything under the one platform will give us better visibility of what our customers want and it also sets us up to use technology like machine learning to identify the things people are likely to call us about,” Mr Cox said.