Logistics Case Study

SAP and CRM transformation, Royal Mail Group

Transforming SAP BW and Oracle CRM technology platforms for Britain’s flagship postal service.

Case study background

We were engaged in several technology transformation initiatives at Royal Mail, the UK’s flagship national postal and courier service, working at the Group’s operational sites and in offices across the country to enhance the IT systems in their order-to-cash process. These enhancements included a CRM upgrade, SAP reconfiguration projects, a data migration initiative, and a programme to deliver enhancements to Royal Mail’s portfolio of Tracked products.

Our hands-on delivery extended to devising test plans, managing test data, scheduling programme-wide test activities, functional test execution, and the delivery of test reporting metrics to senior organisational stakeholders.

Key challenges

Transition of third-party vendors
The CRM upgrade migrated ownership of the platform from one supplier to another. Hesitancy from the outgoing supplier, coupled with distributed teams in the incoming supplier, required our teams to carefully coordinate early engagement with all involved. We set out a proactive and collaborative ‘open door’ policy, underpinned by our mantra of “pick up the phone, don’t sit on a question” to help facilitate this.

Business user time constraints
User Acceptance Testing for one project began at a time where several stakeholders responsible for sign-off were unavailable. We mitigated this by introducing an ‘Early Business Testing’ window with these users two weeks prior to UAT. This retained the opportunity for key approvers to test new functionality and exercise high-priority business processes, providing them with early confidence in the upgraded IT estate.

"They made overall reconciliation and sign-off for the project a whole lot easier."

Janet, Finance Systems Manager

Solution approach and outcome



Progressive acceptance – finding operational defects earlier than UAT

Our introduction of a risk-based Early Business Testing window gleaned valuable results, identifying major issues in some business operational processes that would otherwise have been found much later in the delivery lifecycle. This early identification helped to enable proactive resolution of these issues, saving the added time and cost of rectifying these in later phases.



A smooth delivery, strengthened by co-located early life support

Following a successful SAP upgrade launch, our teams provided guidance and issue resolution as part of an early life support agreement, where we co-located with end users at Royal Mail’s sales offices, Customer Experience sites and Regional Distribution Centres across the UK – from Scotland to London – to ensure the upgraded systems continued to function seamlessly.

Tools & tech stack

SAP

Siebel CRM

HP ALM

IBM DataStage

See how we can help you.

Discover our Quality & Testing services

More case studies

BBC

Media

Providing Quality Management services on a SAP programme at the BBC.

Experian/MIB

Insurance

Delivery of the Motor Insurance Database for the MIB at Experian.

Ordnance Survey

Public Sector

Delivering a Government-backed mapping data programme.

Delivering tomorrow's tech right first time.

We challenge, transform and succeed on IT change programmes, with over 15 years’ experience in Quality & Testing, Cloud & DevOps, and Agile & Delivery solutions.

Company

About Us

Careers

Case Studies

Contact



V1 Consulting is a company registered in England and Wales with company number 15926272 and registered office at Union House, 111 New Union Street, Coventry, West Midlands, United Kingdom, CV1 2NT.