Problem statement: The client had courier operations in a country where postal codes were not commonly used in daily life and our client’s shipment routing was city based. This often led to errors in routing or service unavailable errors if the shipper misspelled the city name or provided an incorrect one. When the national postal service in the country rolled-out about 260k postal codes, operations needed to adapt postal code based routing. The existing corporate routing system allowed only five digit postal codes while this country’s postal codes were seven digits. The client wanted to build an IT application that will enable shipment routing on seven digit postal codes and integrate it into the corporate systems.

Approach and solution: We started by questioning the assumption that the corporate system will not support this country. It was after all supporting many other countries. Our analysis revealed that postal routing doesn’t require the full postal code but only a part of it can be utilized to route shipments. Then, we researched the new postal code system of this country and the shipment routing network. We determined that the first three digits uniquely identified the municipality in a city and the fourth one the post office in the city. Our solution was not to build any new application but to set up shipment routing using the first four digits of the postal code. We socialized the FMO and got a thumbs-up from Operations, Engineering, IT and Marketing.

Benefits: Not only did the client save the cost and time of IT development, they were able to GTM within a matter of weeks while benefiting from the ready-to-use business capabilities of existing corporate systems.