Australia Post (AusPost) has upgraded 4,000 post offices, deliveries facilities and support offices across the country with faster and more reliable internet.
According to the company, the two-year telecommunications transformation program is the largest of its kind undertaken in Australia.
In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the upgrade included the launch of an enterprise-wide collaboration and conferencing platform which was also rolled out to enable remote working for thousands of office-based employees.
The organization’s six contact center operations were standardized onto one platform and 20,000 mobile devices used by support team members were brought together onto one customer-centric platform. At its peak, the upgrade program migrated approximately 100 post offices within five business days.
Munro Farmer, chief information officer, AusPost, 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.”
“We will now be able to scale up internet bandwidth when and where we need to, 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 and machine learning solutions,” said Farmer.
The enhanced service availability also means the organization can switch its focus from reactive support to being proactive in preventing issues.
“We can now identify and mitigate 80% of issues and, as a result, we have been able to reduce business impacting outages by over 70% – a significant achievement for a network as expansive as ours,” added Farmer.
The AusPost telecoms upgrade was delivered with support from partners including Cisco, nbn, Orro Group, Engage, VMware, Star21 and Telstra.