Australia Post: we are building a modern postal service for the future
4,000 Post Offices, deliveries facilities and support offices across Australia have been successfully upgraded with faster and more reliable internet.
Australia Post Chief Information Officer, Munro Farmer said Australia Post’s Telecommunications Transformation program was the largest of its kind undertaken in Australia and was critical in enabling the organisation to continue delivering essential products and services for all Australians through the challenges of COVID-19, including those in rural and remote Australia.
“We are looking after today and tomorrow. We are keeping everyone connected through COVID-19 and we are building a modern postal service for the future,” said Mr Farmer.
“Customers expect more information in real time and transparency through the supply chain and we are making sure we have the telecommunication infrastructure to deliver for them.”
“By transitioning all of our Post Offices and facilities to a new, highly resilient and scalable data network, equipping them with Wi-Fi capability, and improving internet bandwidth, we are now able to deliver a significantly higher service level at every one of our sites.”
“We will now be able to scale up internet bandwidth when and where we need to, accelerate the onboarding of new services to days rather than weeks and enable new capabilities such as mobile point of sale, Internet of Things (IOT), artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions,” said Mr Farmer
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the upgrade which took two years, included an enterprise-wide collaboration and conferencing platform which was also rolled out in just three business days to enable remote working for thousands of office-based Australia Post team members.
The organisation’s six contact centre operations were standardised onto one platform and 20,000 mobile devices used by support team members including mobile phones, laptops and tablets, have been brought together onto one customer-centric platform, greatly enhancing device security and management.
At its peak, the upgrade program migrated approximately 100 Post Offices within five business days.
The enhanced service availability also means the organisation can switch its focus from reactive support to being proactive in preventing issues. “We can now identify and mitigate 80 per cent of issues and, as a result, we have been able to reduce business impacting outages by over 70 per cent – a significant achievement for a network as expansive as ours,” added Mr Farmer.
The Australia Post telecommunications infrastructure upgrade project was delivered with support from partners including Cisco, nbn, Orro Group, Engage, VMware, Star21, and Telstra
