A standard for the future

Interview with Christoph Granig, GTW and Markus Hägele, Swiss Post

Swiss Post is taking great strides on the road to digital transformation. In addition to classic letter and parcel delivery, numerous other services comprise the broadly diversified service portfolio. The more flexible the services, the more flexibly they must also be billed. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), on-demand and sharing services, and e-mobility, for example, are giving rise to their own unique and, above all, new billing models. In a pioneering digitization project with SAP and the international consulting firm GTW, Swiss Post is now gearing up for the future. Old IT roots are to be cut and value flows harmonized. New digital services are also to be flexibly integrated into traditional monetary processes in the future. Billing will then be similar to cloud services in terms of customer-friendliness, for example by rental period or actual duration of use. And with SAP BRIM, a very powerful solution has now been found that can already map this in the standard.

Mr. Hägele, as team leader for financial solutions, you have to keep track of value and goods flows at Swiss Post. That's certainly not such an easy task?

Markus Hägele, Swiss Post: With over 200 million parcel shipments, around 25 million small consignments imported and processed, and almost two billion letter deliveries a year, there is naturally a huge amount of billing data. Regardless of whether these are billed directly via the 800 or so company-operated branches or via one of the almost 5,000 access points including the branch partner network, it is and remains a real challenge. We are therefore fully committed to automation and are trying to make full use of all digital means in this regard. Particularly when it comes to new, disruptive business models, it is vital for us to be fast, open and innovative. The basis for this is modern, future-proof IT, which also enables us to expand classic value flows with new services and billing models.

From left: Christoph Granig, Manager and Principal Solution Architect, GTW, and Markus Hägele, Team Leader Financial Solutions, Swiss Post.

We know from banks that hardly any standards are used. IT then sometimes resembles a historical monument that no one really dares to renovate. With SAP and the consulting firm GTW, Swiss Post has a permanent digitization partner and modernizer at its side. What goals are you currently pursuing and what on-board resources and tools do you rely on in your day-to-day business?

Hägele: Several years ago, we had already initiated the migration from SAP ECC to S/4 Hana. Since various upstream billing systems were used for some postal services in addition to SAP SD, these were also to be gradually centralized and harmonized. As part of this, the decision was made to use SAP BRIM as the central billing and invoicing system. Changing customer requirements can thus be implemented better and faster, and larger volumes of data can be processed very efficiently and with high performance. In this way, we remove a whole series of upstream systems from the processes and can react flexibly to new payment and billing models from a single standard.

Such large projects rarely run on time, on budget and in quality. How do you ensure that your project runs in a coordinated manner over such a long period of time and does not become a cost trap or even fail?

Hägele: We take an iterative approach, repeatedly setting ourselves small goals and trying to implement them in an agile manner. The basic rule is: the journey is the destination and keep your eyes open when choosing a partner. In the case of SAP BRIM, we have found a competent SAP Gold Partner at eye level in GTW. The decisive factors were over 20 years of expertise in this area as well as various successful and large BRIM implementation projects with other major Swiss customers - most recently with the Swiss Federal Railways, for example. Of course, word of such a reference gets around very quickly in the manageable Swiss SAP environment. And after the first meeting, it was clear to all of us that GTW could provide both the appropriate know-how and sufficient manpower for a project of this magnitude.

Christoph Granig, GTW: As an international IT consulting company focusing on mass customer billing using SAP BRIM, we were onboarded in the HWF project at the end of 2018. HWF stands for Harmonization of Value Flows and just as complex as it may sound, it is. In this case, we clearly achieve harmonization through standardization and the use of the flexible end-to-end offer-to-cash solution SAP BRIM. We initially started with two smaller projects in the B2B area to build up the system and introduce the business to the new software. At the beginning of 2022, we were now able to put the logistics services area live on SAP BRIM, where a really large amount of mass data has to be generated and settled in the B2C and B2B areas. We are currently working through the residual balance and optimization list and have already started the next major project to replace the central master data and invoicing system.

Mr. Hägele, at what point were you convinced that a standard solution like SAP BRIM could be the right way forward?

Hägele: SAP BRIM has already proven itself many times over in the telecommunications market, and the monetary processes in the postal industry function similarly and are just as extensive. In the commercial customer market alone, we receive over a million invoices a year. The volume of business is therefore enormous and, accordingly, processing is also extremely demanding. There are different prices and discount structures. If it weren't for BRIM, we would have to build several systems around the process to handle this mass of data. We also see this at other postal companies, which simply can't get a grip on performance any more; they simply run out of time when it comes to invoicing.

And how did you make your team and the individual departments aware of this project? Did a lot of convincing have to be done along the way?

Hägele: In my opinion, it is important to have a solid knowledge of both the actual and the target processes. This should be present in all project participants, as should the will to want to change something for the better. Of course, we on the IT side must also provide the necessary impetus and give our colleagues in the business an impression of the subsequent benefits. In the project itself, it is important to remain realistic and to think in small stages, i.e., not to take on too much at once.

Granig: We already know from other customer projects that those involved take on far too much in too short a time. In most cases, the project goals cannot be met and acceptance by the users cannot be built up; the project is in danger of failing. It is important to achieve small successes quickly and to introduce the users to the new solution in a targeted manner during the introduction. Together, we therefore chose a mixture of the SAFe approach and the Scrum method. In the logistics services area alone, we managed to put five major projects live in this way within a year. Such success creates trust and the other departments also become curious and want to use the new proven solution.

Hägele: Particularly where work is done operationally, such as in the service center, such an introduction is always a huge change for everyone involved. Users are usually skeptical and fear that the new system will not work as well as the old one. At these points, it is always important to have good change management, which is also supported by the executives. An essential part of this is training, both general and in-depth. For the development of these, we had our own team of external training experts and internal process manager, who took care of this exclusively.

They then developed their own documents, for example. GTW also always had a specialist at its side who could explain technical details in meetings with the departments. It was very important for the acceptance that we could distribute the capacities on enough shoulders. At the beginning of the year, we were able to go live with a few very important processes, such as customs clearance. That's about 10,000 transactions a day. This is an extremely critical process for us. If anything goes wrong here, we can't collect the customs duties or the parcels back up at the customs offices. The fact that this has worked so well is ultimately crucial to the fact that we have also been able to gain a lot of trust for our project at the operational hubs.

And still at the end of the interview: What advice do you have for companies facing a similarly large project?

Hägele: Internally, a high degree of collegiality is certainly a prerequisite for success. A good harvest grows on good soil. It is therefore important that a certain work-cultural team spirit prevails. If this is not the case, the team structure can quickly fall apart when the workload increases, ultimately jeopardizing the entire project. In a project like this, you should also keep in mind: Very few things work the first time. Here, it is important not to point the finger at others, but to look for a solution together.

Granig: In the case of Swiss Post, I can say that all employees in the HWF program worked together like Swiss clockwork. At its peak, there were a few hundred people involved in the many sub-projects that had to be coordinated by the program management. There was a hands-on mentality and everyone pulled together. Regardless of whether it was SAP, the consulting firm, or internal employees, you could approach everyone and they supported each other. In addition to the resources used, the commitment of top management, which fully supported the transformation and backed it at all times, was essential for the success of this mammoth project.

E-3: Thank you for the interview.