Credit: Dreamstime
Cisco, NBN Co, Orro Group, Engage, VMware, Star21 and Telstra were involved in Australia Post’s telecommunications transformation program, which the government-owned organisation claims is the largest in the country.
The program, which took two years, involved upgrading the internet for 4,000 post offices, delivery facilities and support offices around the country.
The upgrade included an enterprise-wide collaboration and conferencing platform, which was also rolled out in three business days to enable remote working for thousands of office-based Australia Post team members.
The organisation’s six contact centre operations were standardised onto one platform and 20,000 mobile devices used by support team members, including mobile phones, laptops and tablets, have been brought together into one customer-centric platform, enhancing device security and management.
Australia Post CIO Munro Farmer said the program was the largest of its kind undertaken in Australia and was critical in enabling the organisation to continue delivering essential products and services.
“We are keeping everyone connected through COVID-19 and we are building a modern postal service for the future,” Farmer said. “Customers expect more information in real time and transparency through the supply chain and we are making sure we have the telecommunication infrastructure to deliver for them.
“By transitioning all of our post offices and facilities to a new, highly resilient and scalable data network, equipping them with Wi-Fi capability and improving internet bandwidth, we are now able to deliver a significantly higher service level at every one of our sites.”
Farmer said the upgrade will mean it can scale up internet bandwidth as required, accelerate the onboarding of new services to days rather than weeks and enable new capabilities such as mobile point of sale, internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning solutions.
At its peak, the upgrade program migrated approximately 100 post offices within five business days.
The enhanced service availability also means the organisation can switch its focus from reactive support to being proactive in preventing issues.
“We can now identify and mitigate 80 per cent of issues and, as a result, we have been able to reduce business impacting outages by over 70 per cent – a significant achievement for a network as expansive as ours,” Farmer said.
