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Australia Post said it is revamping its event management platform to further improve parcel tracking in its warehouses.
Australia Post CIO Munro Farmer explained that the need to improve parcel tracking was driven by the increase in parcel shipments.
“What we saw in 2020 is that four in five Australian households – or almost 9 million households – made an online purchase at some point during the year, and included in that number were over 1.3 million households who bought in 2020 who had not bought online in 2019, ”he said.
“This can be attributed to two key factors: repeat buyers buy online much more frequently… but also a large number of new buyers are entering the market for the first time. People feel more comfortable with the online channel because there was none. many choices where they might have gone in a store before; they had to go online to get what they needed every day.
“What this did for us was that it really increased the volume of our business, and to deal with it we had to invest in cloud native solutions that could scale as the business grew. develops in a much more dynamic way.
“Events are really the lifeblood of our business… as packages pass through our network, we scan them, giving you a point of view of where that package actually is in its journey. “
The new event platform is built on Google Cloud and uses a variety of Google Cloud tools, including Big Query, Looker, and Anthos. It replaces an old platform that the company has put in place for “several years”.
“The cloud-native event management platform we’re building right now really allows us to connect our customers, our consumers more efficiently with ultra-low latency data… and built-in security to achieve great levels of visibility. better, but information and control the journey of a parcel through our network as it occurs. We’ve had trouble doing this in the past, ”Farmer said.
Farmer added that by being able to gain greater visibility into how packages move through the network, the company can be proactive in how they manage the customer service experience of delivering packages. .
The work builds on the machine learning that Australia Post uses to tell customers when they can expect a delivery and to forecast mail volumes.
Google Cloud is also used by the company to host the information it has transferred from its data warehouse.
