Challenge

NZ Post delivers 41 million courier parcels annually, each requiring a label for tracking and delivery, as well as a manifest for billing. While most customers submit their manifests via NZ Post’s web service, some rely on “manual manifesting,” which requires them to send the manifest to NZ Post. However, issues like web outages, hardware failure, or human error can prevent these manifests from reaching NZ Post, causing billing problems and wasting time.

Glenn Dodd, Customer Application Lead at NZ Post, says it was a problem that was costing the business significant time and money. “We can’t bill them unless we have a manifest. We were spending hours chasing up customers trying to get the manifests, which could been thousands of items. It was just becoming too hard.”

Solution

Leveraging Flow’s Full Capabilities

NZ Post decided to leverage Flow Software which they were already using for transforming customer data into the required format for processing. To recover the missing manifest data, they used Flow Software to automate the process of reconstructing missing manifests from labelling data collected from scanning and physical data from sorting machines. Flow Software filtered out non-applicable items and mapped various business rules and data points to identify items, generating up to 10,000 manifests per day and $60,000 in invoices daily.

Results

Unlocking Revenue

The process is fully automated, reconstructing manifests and generating revenue for NZ Post with little need for intervention, and can be easily tweaked in a matter of minutes if new business rules need to be applied. The system paid back the Flow licence cost in less than a day and processes approximately $20 million in revenue annually.

A Technical Walkthrough Of Flow & Statelake by NZ Post

Watch Glenn Dodd, Customer Application Lead at NZ Post, give us a behind the scenes look at how they use Flow. This session includes behind the scenes business information and insights as well as technical tricks & tips.