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2024

Pos Malaysia Transforms into a Digitally Driven Parcel and Postal Service Provider by Deploying in AWS

Benefits

50%

reduction in IT infrastructure cost

80%

reduction in time-to-market for new services

0

downtime for systems and applications after migrating to the cloud

99%

uptime achieved, thereby meeting the targeted Service Level Agreement

Overview

For the past 200 years, Pos Malaysia Berhad (Pos Malaysia) has been providing postal services for millions of Malaysians. Today, the organization has over 3,800 retail points and delivers over 1 million letters and nearly 400,000 parcels to over 11 million addresses in Malaysia. As a traditional last-mile logistics business, Pos Malaysia faces pressure to compete against digital-native logistics businesses. As a result, it needed to adapt, scale, and innovate to provide better postal services for customers and remain competitive against its e-commerce counterparts.

In 2022, Pos Malaysia worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Minfy Technologies, an AWS Partner, and AWS Professional Services to migrate its critical application to migrate its critical applications from an on-premises infrastructure to the AWS Cloud. Since the migration, Pos Malaysia has cut IT costs by half, improved the development time of new services by 80 percent, and reduced downtime to zero.

About Pos Malaysia Berhad (“Pos Malaysia”)

Pos Malaysia Berhad (Pos Malaysia) is the national postal and parcel service provider and sole licensee for universal postal services in the country. With a history of over 200 years, the company has diversified beyond the traditional provision of mail and parcel delivery to also offer retail, logistics, and aviation products and services. It has also pivoted from a mail company that also delivers parcels, to a parcel delivery company that also delivers mail. Pos Malaysia has the most extensive last-mile reach, delivering to more than 11 million addresses across the nation. It also has a network of more than 3,800 touchpoints with presence across the country, providing Malaysians the most comprehensive retail network. Pos Malaysia is majority owned by conglomerate DRB-HICOM Berhad.

Opportunity | Modernizing into a Digitally-Driven Parcel and Postal Service Provider

Pos Malaysia is the leading postal service provider with the largest delivery and touchpoint network in Malaysia. With the country’s booming e-commerce market, Pos Malaysia recognized the need to pivot its business focus on parcel delivery. To do this, it needed to modernize and build a scalable infrastructure.

Pos Malaysia’s existing system was built to support its mail and parcel delivery services. However, over time, these legacy systems were unable to cater to the growing customer demands. Specifically, with a monolithic, on-premises infrastructure in place, Pos Malaysia realized that it would be challenging to implement new features, such as real-time parcel tracking, and highly accurate Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) for customers.

Furthermore, Pos Malaysia’s outdated on-premises infrastructure also led to monthly outages of mission-critical applications, each lasting up to two hours. Such incidents would severely disrupt delivery services for end-customers at branches and corporate clients alike. Pos Malaysia’s technicians also had to work overnight to fix these issues.

In May 2022, Pos Malaysia began migrating over 60 critical applications, including parcel tracking and point-of-sale retail, from its on-premises infrastructure to the AWS Cloud.

Solution | Facilitating Innovation with an Agile and Scalable Infrastructure

Since migrating, Pos Malaysia has reduced IT costs by 50 percent and achieved zero downtime.

With AWS, Pos Malaysia can now develop, test, and launch new applications and services to market in half the time. For instance, Pos Malaysia implemented its new ETA feature within just six weeks. Customers can now use the ETA feature to track and receive accurate, up-to-date delivery times for their packages.

Pos Malaysia was also able to scale its compute capacity to handle up to 3 million data transactions with zero downtime and disruptions by using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS). With faster data transactions, customers can enjoy disruption-free services.

Additionally, Pos Malaysia uses Amazon CloudWatch to monitor system and application performance, resource utilization, and operational health. The IT team is able to proactively track and fix potential issues even before outages occur. The organization also deploys Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to secure its virtual networking environment. Amazon VPC helps Pos Malaysia maintain a high level of data security, which is especially important considering the large amount of personal information handled by the organization.

During the migration, AWS conducted foundational training workshops for Pos Malaysia. The AWS Professional Services team also advised Pos Malaysia on the architecture design, migration, implementation, and optimization of AWS services.

Outcome | Navigating the Digital Transformation to Deliver Great Customer Experience

As of May 2023, Pos Malaysia has migrated 65 percent of its workloads, applications, and databases on the AWS Cloud. The organization aims to complete the migration on AWS by the end of 2023.

Already, Pos Malaysia has leveraged its existing database to develop a digital vehicle insurance platform with multiple insurance providers. Looking ahead, the company plans to utilize its database and reduce operational overheads, optimize running costs, improve Service Level Agreement visibility, and launch Address-as-a-Service. Address-as-a-Service would allow partners to receive precise and formatted address details for more efficient end-to-end operations.

Furthermore, Pos Malaysia is exploring using Amazon SageMaker's machine learning capabilities to predict postal service demands via data-driven models, which will be used to improve the deployment and routing of delivery vehicles and staff.

“Migrating to the AWS Cloud has accelerated Pos Malaysia’s transformation into a digital-first organization. We now have the capability to drive faster innovation, improve the customer experience, and become more competitive, all while achieving cost efficiency,” said Sumesh Rahavendra, group chief transformation and digital officer at Pos Malaysia.

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Migrating to the AWS Cloud has accelerated Pos Malaysia’s transformation into a digital-first organization. We now have the capability to drive faster innovation, improve the customer experience, and become more competitive, all while achieving cost efficiency.

Sumesh Rahavendra

Group Chief Transformation & Digital Officer, Pos Malaysia

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