Client Success Story

Australia Post run the National Excellence award program to assist recognition and encouragement of excellence in a range of categories throughout their organisation.  In 2007, the Operations Technology & Data Services section won a National Excellence - Innovative Achievement award for their web mapping application, Postcode Maps, (PCMaps).  The PCMaps application enables Australia Post to efficiently review and update their national postcode boundaries which are critical to delivery of postal services.

Australia Post is continuously reviewing its national postcode boundaries. A key part of this process requires 300 Delivery Centres around Australia to review boundaries and propose amendments.  These amendments are then verified before being adopted for use. The original manual process for provision of maps was both time consuming and slow to turn around updates.

Don Collyer, Mail Processing Technologies Manager, recognised that the original manual processes could be far more efficiently delivered through web-based tools underpinned by mapping. Don led a project to contract Spatial Vision to design and develop a secure web application to produce Australia-wide Postcode Maps. PCMaps enables authorized DC officers to select areas of geographic interest and generate A3 maps to propose amendments. 

PCMaps is hosted by Spatial Vision on behalf of Australia Post. PCMaps is based on the University of Minnesota's open source MapServer software and designed to be an Open GIS Consortium (OGC) compliant infrastructure.  The mapping data is held in Oracle's Locator software that readily matches nine million Australia Post address points to the national PSMA Property dataset. Delivery Centre staff can interactively select and visualize delivery rounds and print out maps to annotate proposed changes.
Using the PCMaps platform, Australia Post has also been able to efficiently verify and update its mail delivery status fields to reduce the number of mail items distributed to persons with ‘No Junk Mail' signs on their properties when performing large mail-outs.

According to Don, the deployment of PCMaps has achieved a number of beneficial outcomes for Australia Post:

1. business efficiencies
2. improved turn around time for updates
3. raised awareness of the power of spatial technologies
4. readiness of delivery centre staff to adopt new technologies when they are easy to use
5. demonstration of the effectiveness of open source solutions

For further information, please contact:
                        
Don Collyer
Mail Processing Technologies Manager
Australia Post
(03) 9204 7543
email

Copyright © Spatial Vision, Friday, 14-December-2007