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 banking to 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.

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 Ka Director CEPT Mysore, Department of Post
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

Situation

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 costeffective 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 is analyzed 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 clientserver 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.

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.