Case Studies - Canada Post

The Client

Canada Post Corporation (CPC) is a Canadian Crown Corporation that collects, processes, and delivers mail across Canada. It has commercial, operational, and financial links with over 200 postal administrations around the world.

CPC is the 46th largest Canadian business and the seventh largest employer in Canada. Its vision is to be a world leader in the provision of innovative physical and electronic delivery solutions, which create value for its customers, employees and all Canadians.

Retail Outlet Service System (ROSS)

Project Description:

After 10 years, Canada Post's Retail Point of Sale system (RPOS) was becoming extremely costly to maintain and extend. The Y2K issue, proprietary hardware, and performance requirements were causing concerns about the system.

In 1996, CPC decided it was time for a new Point-of-Sale system that would support its vision and its operations across the country. The next generation counter automation solution was to be known as the Retail Outlet Service System (ROSS).

The bitHeads Solution:

For three years, bitHeads provided the core development team responsible for the creation of ROSS.

As an extension of Canada Post's corporate systems integrators, bitHeads provided the required resources to make the project a reality. Its development team designed a flexible architecture that would meet both present and future business needs and maximize the opportunity for parallel development.

Throughout the project, bitHeads had as many as ten people working with CPC in a variety of roles, including Software Development Management, System Design and Quality Control.

Results:

With the assistance of the bitHeads development team, CPC was able to hit its Version 1.0 target delivery date of July 7th, 1997—less than nine months after design had started. Seven days later, the software was deployed in the first corporate outlet.

Since then, ROSS has been gradually deployed in over 1,700 of CPC’s automated corporate and franchise outlets across Canada. In addition, Canada Post International is currently selling the application to the postal corporations of several countries.

The success of the ROSS project led to an ongoing relationship between bitHeads and Canada Post and Canada Post International.

In addition to its leadership role on the ROSS project, bitHeads has been intimately involved in the following CPC projects:

CA, a connected desktop application for parcel delivery

ROMS, an enterprise desktop application for managing CPC's corporate outlets

eSOM, an e-commerce application for automating bulk mail transactions

ROSS International ports

RSC/RSA, a replacement of all CPC legacy systems with SAP software.