Prime Vision develops postal sorting ‘decision engine’
Netherlands-based companies Prime Vision and GloMidCo have said they are working together to deliver new capabilities in process and business integration for a major European postal operator. The new project leverages Prime Vision expertise in sorting systems controls and processes along with GloMidCo’s capabilities in middleware connectivity across the business IT platform.
Eddy Thans, CEO Prime Vision, commented that “the platform is the most sophisticated, flexible and dynamic ‘decision engine’ the company has built to date”.
The “decision engine” sits at the heart of the sorting and routing process, the companies said. Traditionally, mailpieces on sorters, whether letters, flats, packets or parcels are identified with barcode and recognition technology, this information is automatically verified against a sorting plan, database or address assignment system to guide the sorter to sort to a particular route or destination.
The new “decision engine” takes on the role of this assignment process, however this is no static database; it’s totally integrated dynamically with the enterprise, delivering many benefits for the client.
Ronald Coenen, Managing Director at GloMidCo expands upon this aspect: “We are talking here about using SOA technology (Service Orientated Architecture) for the seamless integration of many diverse business systems across the enterprise, whether managing business-to-business (B2B) transactions with major shippers, powering track and trace systems, provide value-added services including customer facing services based on mobile devices, creating visibility of business processes, facilitate agility and expansion of services to additional processing sites and revenue protection.
“Information coming into the business is immediately available to all those diverse processes and can be propagated immediately into the clients operations such as sorting systems as in this case.”
The postal operator’s existing IT infrastructure consists of custom business applications, but overall the infrastructure is difficult to modify and expensive to maintain. To help promote efficiency, facilitate growth, and reduce costs, the operator decided to implement a SOA built with the Progress Software Sonic platform using Progress Actional for SOA Governance.
Every day, the operator exchanges thousands of packages with third-party companies that service parcel delivery to international locations.
