GeoPost UK
GeoPost UK is a leading express parcel carrier and part of LaPoste, Europe’s second largest postal group. Operating as the DPD and Interlink Express brands in the UK, the business has more than 130 depots, 4000 employees and delivers millions of parcels a year. The company has thousands of customers, ranging from multi-nationals to individuals, high street and online retailers.
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GeoPost UK’s senior management team, depot and account managers ran and planned the business (day-to-day and long term) using Excel generated reports. Spreadsheets were manually produced, manipulated and reformatted to produce the required information. As the business has grown, the reports have deviated considerably – departments wanted different reports, formats changed and data was processed multiple times to give specific information.
Challenge
GeoPost UK decided to completely revise its information management. Realising that the business needed to analyse data right down to the individual parcel level, GeoPost personnel wanted to provide a management dashboard which could display the business’ key metrics. GeoPost invited several BI vendors to present their ideas to the company’s Board using GeoPost UK’s own data for the project. But the results from the BI vendors failed to impress, as Vernon Adams, Head of Technology, explained “We were looking at costs of around £1.5million, but the Board just didn’t see the value, particularly as the cost excluded ongoing license and support costs”.
Using proprietary software, the project was estimated at £1.5 million: we couldn’t see the value, when the Open Source alternative would give cost savings of more than 75% for the project.
- Vernon Adams, Head of Technology Architecture & Strategy, GeoPost UK
Solution
Using open source solutions from Jaspersoft, Talend and Infobright, GeoPost implemented the system at a cost of 75% less than alternative approaches. Infobright, with its columnar structure, dramatically improved analytical query times and also simplified data warehouse operations by reducing or eliminating the need for aggregate tables. GeoPost UK has now deployed the new reporting dashboard to more than 600 users across the organisation.
There’s now a standardised interface through the business, through which we can analyse our operations far more effectively. The Board, depot and account managers and the sales teams can drill right down to the individual parcel or delivery route level - in a way that simply wasn’t possible previously. As a result, we’re better placed to make changes and alter the way we operate to increase profitability and further improve our customer service.”
- Vernon Adams, Head of Technology Architecture & Strategy, GeoPost UK
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