The Post Office is rolling out a £150m SAP implementation over the
next three years to help it become a competitive global
distribution company branching into e-business
The Post Office's internal consultancy and technical organisations
will work with Deloitte Consulting and SAP to develop its next
generation corporate infrastructure.
Roger Tabor, the Post Office's strategic information director,
said: "The over-riding ambition of the Post Office is to become a
complete distribution company with global reach, and SAP can help
us to achieve this."
The £7bn organisation was restructured last year, and its
multiple business units were streamlined to provide a unified
corporate infrastructure.
Tabor said that before re-organisation the Post Office had four
separate SAP financial systems installed by different business
units. "We had to do a significant cut and paste job on our legacy
systems to make the reorganisation work," he said. "Now we want
Post Office-wide, reliable, integrated, standardised systems and
processes as a solid base to build our e-business platform."
Tabor would not quantify the cost savings the implementation was
expected to bring, but he was clear about the business benefits.
"We'll get a slicker operation, a common look and feel for our
systems and reliable, consistent data throughout the
corporation."
The Post Office's decision was driven by the findings of
PricewaterhouseCoopers' international benchmarking service, which
Tabor said showed "we were some way short of the best".
The new platform will be SAP R/3 with some elements of the
mySAP.com Internet package. The Post Office has decided against
using SAP for customer relationship management.
In the first phase of the implementation, which will begin next
spring, the existing finance and human resources systems in the
Post Office will be pulled out and replaced.
The new corporate infrastructure will support all the Post
Office's lines of business, creating a central shared system to
eliminate duplication of records and information.
GartnerGroup research director Nigel Wood said, "The Post Office
will gain considerable benefits from the adoption of a well
integrated back-office business model."
Wood said it had become increasingly fashionable to dismiss
enterprise resource planning (ERP) packages like SAP as irrelevant
to e-business, or claim they were old technology and a millstone
round the necks of business.
"The e-zealots say e-business is all about an organisation's
external links," said Wood, "but ERP offers a reliable
transactional backbone."