Eradicating Fujitsu and Horizon from the Post Office, step by step

More than an EPOS

It is not a simple change. Anastassi said one of the challenges of replacing the system is that it is much more than just swapping out an electronic point of sale (EPOS) system, which is what Horizon is often described as.

“People often refer to [this project] as the Horizon replacement, but it absolutely is not,” Anastassi told Computer Weekly. “Horizon is broken into many components, and the front end is just one part of it.”

People often refer to [this project] as the Horizon replacement, but it absolutely is not. Horizon is broken into many components, and the front end is just one part of it

He described the system as “very, very bespoke” in its current form.

“There are more than 80 components that make up the Horizon platform, and only half of those are managed by Fujitsu. The other components are internal and often with other third parties as well,” he added.

“There’s a whole load of processing modules that sit behind that allow a subpostmaster to sell a product. It even touches our core finance system and our data platform.”

Anastassi, who has 30 years’ experience in IT management, including roles at Lockheed Martin, Vodafone and Rank Group, said the front-end EPOS system replacement is very important, however, because the current one “has aged, to say the very least”.

The plan is to introduce a modern front end that is device agnostic. “We want to get away from [the need] to have a certain device on a certain terminal in your branch. We want to provide flexibility around that,” said Anastassi.

He said the roll-out of the new front end doesn’t have to happen at the same time as the back end, because they are “deliberately separate”.

Composing the system

Key to the future and the new approach is a composable architecture, said Anastassi. This will allow the Post Office to bring in systems that it doesn’t build itself. “We may buy software as a service [SaaS] off-the-shelf, and they have to fit in with that composable structure,” he explained. “It’s an event-driven, service-orientated architecture, which means we build and we buy where appropriate.”

For example, he said it will keep what he describes as “the Post Office secret sauce”, which are the products that it needs to maintain and bring to market. But other utility-based components can be taken as SaaS, which the CTO said “makes them much more reliable, far more available, and [means] they meet a common standard from end to end”.

Anastassi stressed: “Our technology will be standards-based, which is not where we are today.” This is part of the plan to avoid what came before and simplify the future.

“I’ve got one eye on making sure that we are never again in a situation that we found ourselves in with Horizon, but also that the future platform can deliver the services that subpostmasters want for years to come, without having to go through massive updates and refunding and so on. It’s just a far simpler way of working,” he said.

The poisoned chalice

Anastassi is not the first person to be given the task of terminating Horizon and ending Fujitsu’s contract.

In 2015, the Post Office began a project to replace Fujitsu and Horizon with IBM and its technology, but after things got complex, Post Office directors went crawling back to Fujitsu.

Then, after Horizon was proved in the High Court to be at fault for the account shortfalls that subpostmasters were blamed and punished for, the Post Office knew it had to change the system. This culminated in the New Branch IT (NBIT) project, but this ran into trouble and was eventually axed. This was before Anastassi’s time, and before that of its new top team of executives.

It was the Post Office’s current chairman Nigel Railton who told the Post Office scandal public inquiry that the NBIT project was “set up to fail” and needed to be reset, largely due to the decision to build the new system in-house.

The current project seeks to avoid problems caused by that decision, which he said was “fundamentally wrong in hindsight”.

The core suppliers

Things are finally moving at pace, and by the summer of this year, two separate contracts will be signed with suppliers, signalling the beginning of the final act for Fujitsu and its Horizon system.

The Post Office put two contracts out to tender. The first, Lot 1, will see a supplier take over the existing Horizon services in a £323m deal. It will include application support, development and release management, as well as migration from the on-premise datacentre to the cloud, and the establishment of a cloud-native back-office and channel platform.

Known as the Walk in and Take Over (WITO) contract, it had many bidders, but has been reduced to a handful of suppliers, according to Anastassi. Computer Weekly has learned that IBM is one such company.

The second contract, Lot 2, is for an off-the-shelf EPOS system. A dozen suppliers bid for this £169m contract, but only three made the shortlist due to a lack of experience in Post Office environments, said Anastassi.

He emphasised that experience in a Post Office setting is vital to subpostmasters, who have very specific needs. “When we did the initial assessments, we had subpostmasters in the room and [it emerged] a number of bidders just didn't have either the expertise, the platform or the experience,” he said.

“It’s not just about the tech, it’s about whether, as a business, they could deliver that service going forward as well.”

One of the criteria for suppliers, all very aware of the Horizon troubles, was a desire to make things right at the Post Office.

“When we did our initial presentation assessment with subpostmasters, every single CEO of all the companies were either here in person to give an overview as to why they were wanting and willing to be involved, or they sent videos.”

Anastassi said the speed at which the project has proceeded has surprised stakeholders. “We’re ahead of where we said we would be and that’s a surprise for them. I think it’s been historically quite difficult to get things to a place where promises are delivered.”

“I wouldn’t be out of place to say that in our latest board meeting, where I gave an update, the board in general was saying that we didn’t think we would get to where we are today at the speed that we have.”

Subpostmasters embedded

South Somerset-based subpostmaster Jim Gordon is one of the subpostmasters who have attended presentations as part of a team known as “adopt a function”, which advises the Post Office in relation to the project.

Gordon told Computer Weekly: “We are embedded into Post Office departments, with something like 16 subpostmasters that can be called upon.

As we go through the next few months, when we identify problem areas ... we’ll include subpostmasters as we go through

“There are groups of subpostmasters that go to the presentations, and they get a chance to provide feedback. So, we are involved and have sight of what’s going on and an opportunity to comment as well, which helps break down that culture of the past.”

For example, Anastassi said: “As we go through the next few months, when we identify problem areas, where we either don’t have a service or it would be an enhancement to provide something different, then we’ll include subpostmasters as we go through.”

Anastassi said it is not just time being saved, but also money, in the long run. He could not give a final project cost, because the best and final offers from suppliers won't be known until later this year. “All I can tell you at the moment is, based on the questions we’ve been asked, it’s a considerable cost saving over what we currently pay for Fujitsu,” he told Computer Weekly.

When it comes to what the new system should look like, Anastassi’s description of a composable architecture could fit the bill, because, according to Gordon, business in Post Office branches is changing rapidly and requires systems that can support this.

“How we serve customers is changing,” he said. “The sort of things that I was doing a year ago are starting to die off now. So, I can’t tell you what a Post Office branch is going to look like in 2028 or 2030, I really don’t know. But I need a platform that I can get the information from or deliver a customer journey that’s flexible and adaptable.

“I’m also hoping that training has been thought about. It’s certainly been talked about, so that non-techies can seamlessly work and not feel threatened.”

What went wrong?

It is feedback from people on the front line, like Gordon, that can help the Post Office avoid the problems of the past.

Anastassi said understanding what went wrong was an essential first step for him.

He said Horizon was missing vital components required by subpostmasters, but the problem was more about people’s understanding of computers, or lack of it.

It was a fundamental misunderstanding of computers that led to the scarcely believable events of the Post Office scandal. Subpostmasters were automatically made responsible for account discrepancies, despite the figures emanating from an error-prone system.

“When ambiguity was there, the assumption that was made was ‘it’s a computer, so of course it must be right’, but in my view and my experience, no system is infallible, no matter how well you build it,” said Anastassi.

“Anybody who sits in front of a common operating system, like Windows, every day, knows random things happen for reasons that you don’t know. And quite often, it’s a bug. Horizon is no different, and shouldn’t have been treated any differently,” he said.

“Things can go wrong, and inevitably will. At the end of the day, the people who write the code are people. We’re not infallible. I think it would be a very naive view to say any organisation could build a platform that won’t ever have a problem. It will, but it’s how you deal with the problem that is important.”

Current system status

Anastassi’s role isn’t just about the future. Horizon may be on its way out, but about 11,000 businesses currently rely on it and will continue to do so for a few more years. It is therefore vital that the current system is maintained.

With ageing equipment and ageing software, as with any dated platform, there are upgrades that must be done. “For us, it’s very much about doing those upgrades, making those enhancements, as and when we need to in the most respectful way we possibly can, without wasting lots and lots of public money.”

Anastassi said Horizon is “remarkably stable” at present, but he added: “We can’t paint it a different colour and call it something else. It’s old and it won’t last forever. We can nurse it along, which we will do, but it won’t ever be the thing of the future.”

He said there are currently three outstanding software bugs that his team knows about, which are all issues with the way in which things appear on a screen. “There’s no fundamental back-end challenges in terms of how Horizon operates or whether it’s making mistakes, but we do have a substantial operations team to take various calls where there are concerns around things that happen.”

The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to Horizon accounting software, which led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history (see below timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal since 2009).