“Capgemini responded with a cloud-based, rapid-development platform from IBM called BlueMix, and it is exactly what we were looking for.”

Kenneth VerlageCIO E-commerce and Logistics at PostNord

The Situation

One of PostNord’s Stockholm-based customers has an e-commerce shop selling t-shirts and athletic wear. His business was growing and one day his first order came from Norway. As he was now dealing with an export, this presented a new set of challenges such as customs charges and time implications, and how returns would be handled.

PostNord had the information its customer needed, but what it didn’t have was a platform to get the answer to the customer quickly. This helped them realize that they needed a quick-response method to respond to evolving and emerging customer needs.

The postal market is changing rapidly. Fast digitization is leading to new opportunities for postal companies, driven by the consumer and customer needs in the e-commerce market. This shift is a learning experience, and so there is a need to take many products to market quickly to see how customers respond. Not all of them will succeed, and PostNord is willing to let many fail, but they should fail fast and inexpensively. The ones that succeed can then be further developed and continue to evolve.

Overview

Customer Name: PostNord Industry: Logistics Location: Nordics, based in Stockholm, Sweden

Business Need: Rapid software prototyping platform

Solution-at-a-glance: IBM Bluemix

Results: Releases went from six-month to three-week cycles.

PostNord – Innovating like a Startup Reducing the release cycle from 6 months to 11 working days

in collaboration with PostNord

the way we do itPostNord

©2016 Capgemini. No part of this document may be modified, deleted or expanded by any process or means without prior written permission from Capgemini. Rightshore® is a trademark belonging to Capgemini.

About CapgeminiWith more than 180,000 people in over 40 countries, Capgemini is one of the world’s foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services. The Group reported 2015 global revenues of EUR 11.9 billion. Together with its clients, Capgemini creates and delivers business, technology and digital solutions that fit their needs, enabling them to achieve innovation and competitiveness. A deeply multicultural organization, Capgemini has developed its own way of working, the Collaborative Business ExperienceTM, and draws on Rightshore®, its worldwide delivery model.

Learn more about us at: www.capgemini.com.

About PostNordWe deliver! PostNord is the leading supplier of communication and logistics solutions to, from and within the Nordic region. We ensure the postal service to households and businesses in Sweden and Denmark. With our expertise and strong distribution network, we develop options for tomorrow’s communication, e-commerce, distribution and logistics in the Nordic region. In 2015, the Group had 35,000 employees and sales of about SEK 40 billion. The Parent Company is a Swedish public limited company headquartered in Solna, Sweden. Visit us at www.postnord.com

The collaborative experienceCapgemini recognized PostNord’s need to achieve faster time to market while maintaining operational stability and keeping costs low. Stakeholders from both sides worked together as one team, which required boldness and commitment. Having delivered the project successfully, they learned that long-term innovation thrives in an atmosphere of partnership.

The Innovation Lab

In big organizations such as PostNord, there can be many roadblocks to innovation. Corporate culture is fixed and rigid. Having to show proof of concept before getting approval for a pilot can be a cumbersome process.

Through social media, PostNord connected with a Capgemini representative, and together they worked on circumventing these roadblocks in the context of an innovation lab, which they called “Logistics Lab.”

They brought together a diverse, cross-disciplinary team who worked together on a lot of small topics, quickly brainstorming innovative approaches to real issues such as the one faced by PostNord’s sportswear-selling customer. They worked on the premise that it was ok to fail, as long as the failure was inexpensive and they learned from it. It also helped them to think and act more like a startup.

The Solution

To realize the innovations conceived in the lab, they needed a cloud-based rapid development platform. The solution they chose, developed by Capgemini’s partner IBM, is known as IBM BlueMix. This Platform-as-a-Service integrates DevOps to build, run, deploy and manage applications in the cloud. The new apps integrate with PostNord’s existing systems; the connections are secure and data is synchronized. The open and integrated development experience is also scalable, enabling developers to continuously deliver new functions by learning from their users.

The hard work of implementing on the BlueMix platform meant combining front-end ingenuity with back end reality. Thanks to the core business competence in both the discovery and delivery phases, the team worked together to deploy the BlueMix-based solution in just 11 working days.

The Result

In terms of look and feel, the outcome aligned with other PostNord offerings. It is customizable, and can accommodate new functionalities intuitively, thus optimizing end-user experience.

Introducing builds on the new platform dramatically reduced time-to-market.Whereas previously releases ran on six month pilots, with BlueMix this was reduced to three week Minimum Viable Products.

And perhaps most importantly, it also showed that a large organization such as PostNord was capable of innovating like a startup.