Royal Mail needs to remain competitive in a changing business environment. It has shifted several of its workloads to Microsoft Azure, helping it access Azure services that enable it to deploy new software to the business more rapidly. They are benefiting from the automation and elasticity of cloud provisioning to drive efficiencies in development and deployment, and better support the business including with its goals for transformation.
Royal Mail relies on Microsoft Azure to increase the pace of innovation to its business
Royal Mail is the UK’s universal service provider for letters to the nation’s 32 million households. To stay competitive in a changing world, where online shopping and digital communications have transformed postal delivery requirements, it is partnering with Microsoft to drive progress and the pace of innovation.
Royal Mail has a fantastic 500-year history – but that brings with it 500 years’ worth of challenges. That’s why Royal Mail is partnering with Microsoft to move some of its technology stack into the latest technologies that are more suitable for a business of Royal Mail’s size and scale.
Royal Mail is transitioning from a letter delivery service to a parcel delivery organisation. Customer expectations are wholly different. Today, customers expect to see the status of their parcel in real time and see whether the parcel has been delivered successfully and securely. Royal Mail needs systems that can support up to 20 million events per hour, 100,000 operational staff and the flexing of resources given the high degree of seasonality in the business.
Delivering a platform for the future with Microsoft Azure
In February 2015, Royal Mail acquired Storefeeder, a software development business that had built Royal Mail’s consumer and small business shipping tool Click & Drop, which had launched in October 2014. As a business that was born in the cloud on Microsoft Azure, the company’s agility and pace of delivery demonstrated the benefits of taking a “cloud first” approach.
“Microsoft Azure is the right solution for us,” states Alex Lorke, Director of Product Engineering at Royal Mail. Choosing Microsoft Azure means Royal Mail now has the agility and elasticity to flex resources responsively, optimising costs around seasonality and peak hours. Its also seen a huge reduction in the time and complexity of testing and maintaining the solution for an overall reduction in the total cost of ownership in the seven-digit figures.
This understanding inspired Royal Mail to migrate the technology stack of another technology acquisition, Intersoft – acquired in March 2016 and which serves international fulfilment and logistics propositions – also onto Microsoft Azure.
Microsoft Azure enables greater agility
One of the key benefits for Royal Mail has been the new elasticity it enjoys around the provision of IT resources. In particular, it is benefitting from some of the automated provisioning capabilities that Azure offers.
Darren Hatton, Head of Shipping and Payments at Royal Mail, explains, “I don’t need to think: do I need another server to go in? As soon as the volume comes in, the application automatically scales up.”
This flexibility and agility not only supports efficient, stable business operations. It also offers additional benefits around flexible provisioning. Darren Hatton continues, “It means I can automate a lot of the testing because I can scale up and simulate the load so that I can be confident that when we’re deploying change, I’m not going to encounter problems when it goes into production.”
Uptime has improved and time and resources can now be redirected to innovation. The pace of change has increased – with average delivery reduced from six weeks to two. Most importantly, it now has the perfect platform to realise the full benefits of cloud and support broader transformation.
Early success drives an appetite for more innovation
Having seen the success of migrating to Azure for this specific part of the business, Royal Mail has expanded its transformation ambitions. The postal digital assistant (PDA) is the company’s biggest internal application.
“Since 2019, we’ve been developing all our applications on the PDA using the Microsoft Azure backbone,” reports Alex Lorke. “It’s a huge success story with regards to increasing the pace of delivery to our frontline colleagues.”
“We’re starting to get value from multiple servers interacting with each other using Azure as the foundation,” he continues. As more solutions are migrated to Azure, the opportunities for further efficiencies and for data insights and innovation will increase.
Most excitingly, these changes will enable the next strategic technical innovation: the creation of a Royal Mail digital twin.
“It’s effectively the digital equivalent of what we do every day throughout our supply chain,” Alex Lorke explains. “And we can use that information to optimise our capabilities… It will set us up for the future to successfully compete against the digital natives and other courier businesses.”
Reinvention through a fantastic partnership with Microsoft
Royal Mail is excited about the opportunities its partnership with Microsoft opens up, especially around novel, cloud-based technologies and responsible AI. This includes Microsoft Copilot in Azure, Copilot for Security and GitHub Copilot for Azure Data Studio.
Alex Lorke states, “We’ve started to look at the use of Copilot to make our software engineers more productive.”
For Royal Mail, its partnership with Microsoft is absolutely foundational. The team recognises the need to reinvent Royal Mail and the vital importance of partnerships, like the one with Microsoft, to help achieve its transformation goals.
“We’ve started to look at the use of Copilot to make our software engineers more productive.”
Alex Lorke, Director of Product Engineering, Royal Mail
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