The new era of the automated teller
The Israel Postal Company Ltd. (formerly the Israel Postal Authority) is characterized by its widespread deployment throughout the country.
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The company holds and operates approximately 250 offices, 400 agencies and about 50 vehicles that serve as mobile post offices and reach the most remote destinations in the country. The Israel Postal Company operates over 2000 work stations that are operated by managers and tellers in these locations.
The company constantly enriches its array of beneficial services offered to the public.
Services provided go beyond traditional expectations such as the various forms of mailing letters and packages and telegram wiring and include banking and additional services for government offices and other organizations.
The Israel Postal Company envisions itself as the "National Teller".
In order to fulfill this vision a comprehensive teller support system has been developed by Ness Technologies, Inc.
The Business Challenge
The Israel Postal Company's evolution has been characterized by broadening services offered and attempting to provide these with information system support. The system infrastructure was laid back in 1990 and was based on a now outdated DOS environment.
Towards the end of the 1990's it became apparent that the existing system had become insufficient due to low reaction times, an unfriendly user interface and predominantly the lack of ability to provide a pliable and convenient platform for the array of future innovative services. These services were to be providing based on the vast deployment of the company's offices and agencies.
"On the one hand we held an immense business advantage in the form of an unmatched location deployment that many business organizations wished to utilize for their purposes but on the other hand we found it difficult to provide them a sufficient high speed computerized response" says Mr. Gidi Goel, VP Teleprocessing at "The Israel Postal Company Ltd". "One example was the insurance agencies "Direct Insurance ("Bituch Yashir") which sought to use our locations to activate their issued insurance policies. We were obliged to create a suitable solution in our information system that would enable our tellers to perform the operation.
In addition we had to interface with the insurance agencies' computer system in order to provide them with on-line activation updates. Naturally, our inability to swiftly respond to requests of this sort could have sent previously mentioned organizations looking for other alternatives and cause our company substantial loss of income".
As a result of the challenges it faced, resulting from market competition, the company defined a number of objectives for the new system that would support all the postal teller's operations.
"We wanted the system to be user friendly and enable swift change adaptation, provide high endurance under various breakdown situations and be based on advanced technologies and enable us to interface quickly and easily with information systems that are used by our potential clients such as insurance companies, universities, government offices and other organizations. We sought an answer to contradicting demands – on the one hand a centralized on-line system and on the other utmost endurance of the office system" says Mr. Goel.
The Solution
In response to these demands Ness Technologies, Inc., the project winner, developed a multi-user, decentralized system rich in assorted operations with the ability to interface with additional systems. This system is based on an applicable information transfer infrastructure tool utilizing Messaging in a Web environment.
"We began to inquire what was being done in other postal services worldwide and discovered that the Israeli postal service is definitely unique in the array of services it has to offer" Notes Mr. Goel. "After formulating an RFI that defines the functionality, the degree of endurance, the performance and directness we received 8 different offers from leading Israeli integration companies. Amongst the array of offers, Ness had the most outstanding, based on an American "Escher" software package.
This software solution that is used by postal services worldwide can be found in England, Austria, Denmark, Portugal and other locations. Our research has proven that this solution combines the explicit requirement for utmost endurance of the office system with excellent on-line capabilities on a centralized level".
The development Environment
Platformed on the WebRiposte software program the project was developed using Microsoft tools and a WIN 2000 operating system environment. Most of the projects components were written in VB, HTML and a few were written in C, C++. The emulation tool ERICOM HostPublisher was incorporated to control smart emulation and interface with CICS/CSP transactions that are controlled by the IBM-MF banking service computer. The report control tool is Active Report.
The Results
"It's a different league all together as far as the level of information the organization receives" says Mr. Goel in satisfaction "On the tactical level, the regional manager sees figures that could only have been dreamt of in the past. Locations that have been working with the system for a number of months have considerably increased their customer service times and as a result customer satisfaction has risen".
"The system has proven itself to be very stable and was accepted well beyond the most optimistic expectations" states Mr. Rafi Francis, VP Teleprocessing at "The Israel Postal Company Ltd" during the system development stage. "It provides a pleasant interface, user-friendly and flexible. Undoubtedly the people at Ness have done an outstanding job here both with the development and with the implementation and training that enabled our workers a smooth entrance into the system. These workers had grown used to working with a different system for over a decade, but after only 2 days training they were working with the new one. Their ability to offer new services and special deals on-line has substantially broadened the "Israel Postal Company"s business potential and the financial managers within in the company express immense satisfaction with the system".
