An Post

Customer’s Challenge

An Post is the national postal service for Ireland and is owned by the Irish government. Fujitsu provides An Post with application outsourcing services to enhance the functionality and ensure the long-term reliability of the Staff Remuneration and Administration Management System (STREAMS). STREAMS is bespoke mission critical staff remuneration system, which relies on Fujitsu’s high standard support and maintenance services to sustain maximum uptime.

An Post needed to implement a nationwide time and attendance system and commenced invited tenders from external vendors for IT system design and development services to replace the manual system used to provide the calculation and recording for its staff remuneration function. During 2000, Fujitsu (then DMR Consulting) was selected to produce a scalable, reliable system using Microsoft server technologies.

STREAMS has since been commissioned with 320 plus An Post offices across Ireland and is currently used to process the remuneration details of 9,000 employees on a weekly basis. Regina Moran, chief operating officer, Fujitsu Services comments “An Post’s staff remuneration business requirements are changing constantly, requiring high availability of skilled developers to be available to deliver the changes to the system in a timely manner. Fujitsu has provided An Post with a stable, effective and efficient time recording system that has been deployed countrywide.”

Fujitsu is also responsible for developing and managing new releases of the application so as to ensure that STREAMS continues to meet these changes. In mid 2006 Fujitsu signed a three year technical development & support contract to support the bespoke, mission critical STREAMS application. Moran continues “I believe it is because of the success of the system Fujitsu were engaged by An Post to provide long-term support for the Streams application.”

Fujitsu Solution

Fujitsu has provided An Post with a stable, effective and efficient time recording system that has been deployed countrywide and have since been engaged by An Post to provide long-term support for the STREAMS software. To ensure best practices are followed, Fujitsu has also help to establish defined processes and procedures, based on our Macroscope methodology, that have helped An Post to become more efficient in the way that they deal with STREAMS changes, problems and incidents.

Syl Byrne, IT Manager Remuneration Services with An Post comments on the technical development & support contract signed in mid 2006: “An Post were already working with Fujitsu on a support contract. The difference this time however is, we decided to engage Fujitsu for a three year rather than the previous annual renewals. We were very happy with the levels of service provided by Fujitsu in the past and we are confident they will continue to offer us these same levels of service through out the terms of this contract.”

Benefits to our Customer

By allowing all cost centres to capture staff time recording data using STREAMS, An Post have been able to greatly speed up the process for capturing the required data for its weekly payroll run. The system has greatly improved the accuracy of the details submitted through embedded business rules, which has minimised the number of payroll queries and adjustments.

Our Approach

STREAMS was developed as a client server system using Microsoft technologies and went live in November 2001. Since then, Fujitsu have been providing additional enhancements and development projects for the system. An Post adopted a phased approach to the STREAMS rollout, which allowed discrete requirements to be catered for in many of the different offices around Ireland. Management requirements were also identified that have maximised the business benefits of the company wide system, e.g.:

Costing Reports: to enable management to track the employee costs for each cost centre.
Processing of casual staff remuneration: At various times of the year An Post need to employ large numbers of casual staff to deal with additional workload (e.g. extra 1500 staff over Christmas). Functionality has been added to enable the time recording details for these employees to be recorded through STREAMS and hence providing significant time savings over the replaced manual system.
Functionality to deal with local working arrangements has been provided for a number of An Post cost centres.
Performance Improvements: Given that the number of employees having their time recording details entered via STREAMS exceeded original estimates, Fujitsu has upgraded the infrastructure and optimized the software to ensure that it can deal with the increased demands.

Our Expertise

Fujitsu’s core strength is designing, building and operating IT systems and services for clients in the public and private sectors. Fujitsu’s Macroscope® ProductivityCentre™ is a robust, structured and evolving development approach encapsulating more than thirty years of know-how, and described by Gartner as the most extensive set of integrated methods, techniques and tools in the marketplace today.

Once development completed we continued our engagement with An Post and have supported the organisation in the transition from development to support. Since then Fujitsu have managed and led development for all new enhancement and development projects for the STREAMS application. With our in-depth knowledge of the application gained from our work on the original development project Fujitsu has been selected as the vendor of choice for new development projects under a long term software support and enhancement contract.

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