India’s largest IT services company, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), has partnered with the Department of Posts in a bid to transform it into a multi-service digital hub, modernise the delivery of mail and packages, enhance customer experience, and launch innovative services that will drive new revenues.
At the heart of this transformation is the Core System Integration (CSI) program designed and implemented by TCS. This involved deploying an integrated ERP (enterprise resource planning) solution that caters to mail operations, finance and accounting, and HR functions, and connects its vast network of more than 150,000 post offices, making this the largest distributed ePostal network in the world.
The integrated solution is built to cater to the Department’s immense scale, and future needs. It supports the HR needs of over 500,000 employees, services over 40,000 concurrent users, and processes over 3 million postal transactions a day, making this one of the largest SAP implementations in the world.
On the front-end, TCS has implemented its Point of Sale (PoS) solution across 24,000 post offices with over 80,000 PoS terminals, making this amongst the largest such implementations in the world. Additionally, TCS has built a web portal with consignment tracking capabilities, and set up a multi-lingual call center for customer support.
According to Debashis Ghosh, Business Group Head – Public Services, TCS: “In a digital era, postal services across the world are reinventing themselves to stay relevant to a new generation,” said. “We are proud to have partnered with the Department of Posts in this pioneering, mission mode initiative to build a world-class, a future-ready digital platform that the nation can be proud of. With this, the department can offer smart postal services, enriched customer experiences, and innovative value-added services to the citizens of India.”
An important objective of the transformation is to use the department’s nation-wide reach to drive financial inclusion and accessibility of citizen services in remote areas.
This is being accomplished through over 130,000 DARPAN (Digital Advancement of Rural Post Office for A New India) hand-held devices that Gramin Dak Sevaks use to provide postal, banking, insurance, and cash management services in remote villages, even those without network connectivity.