Malaysia's primary postal and courier service provider, Pos Malaysia Berhad, is building on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to transform its traditional mail and parcel delivery operations in order to enhance customer experience.
The national postal service provider will shut down its on-premises data centres and move the IT infrastructure to AWS cloud computing service.
Pos Malaysia’s Chief Digital & Transformation Officer Sumesh Rahavendra said at an AWS event that the organisation has made "incredible" progress in a very short period of time. “We have moved most of our services to the cloud in about eight months without really impacting any users,” he said.
By committing fully to AWS, the firm has cut IT expenditures by half while improving the customer experience with new digital solutions focused on their needs.
“We can now provide consumers with more efficient delivery accessing more than 10 million addresses, and a retail network that includes more than 3,500 points of contact,” he added.
Rahavendra said the firm had over 140 monolithic legacy applications with an "incredibly" difficult landscape for optimisation.
It also had some hardware requirements for on-premise service that eventually forced the migration to the cloud.
Transferring apps
The company transferred 60 essential apps to AWS in June 2022 including parcel tracking, point-of-sale retail, SAP, human resources, supply chain, and mail tracking.
To scale its workloads, the firm uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service interface that offers scalable cloud computing resources.
It allows Pos Malaysia to better assist its clients through hassle-free delivery at busy times like sales promotions and holidays.
The company has also created a consolidated data repository for an integrated data platform on AWS to better understand consumer needs, discover delivery efficiencies, and enhance operations.
For instance, it uses Amazon SageMaker, a service for creating, training and deploying machine-learning models to forecast delivery demands and allocate resources like vehicles and personnel to meet them.
“We could easily manage peak periods with high parcel volumes,” Rahavendra said.
Pos Malaysia has been able to create the pipelines and computation layers, reducing their estimated time of arrival (ETA) down to a three-hour window, thus reaping the direct benefit of enhancing the end-customer experience.
Speaking on the future plans, Rahavendra said their teams are now building a lot of essential cloud-native systems that they need in-house.
We have a number of scenarios like our sortation centres, where we have automated using automatic sorters to make instant decisions rather than going back to the cloud to look for data. He added that he wants to explore more such areas along with the AWS ecosystem.
“We look forward to phasing out old systems and consolidating functions and processes to become more efficient, adding value to the business and starting to save on time, cost and building customer experience,” he explained.
