Innovapost: Managed Application Development

Accenture teams with Innovapost Inc. to help Canada Post achieve high performance.

To help Canada Post, Accenture and Innovapost professionals have worked together on a wide variety of application-development programs leveraging IT to spur innovative customer solutions, generate new revenue streams and increase productivity.

Through more than 20 processing centers, Canada Post delivers about 10 billion pieces of mail to 13 million Canadian addresses each year. In 2002 Canada Post partnered with CGI Group Inc., to launch Innovapost Inc., a company that now provides state-of-the-art systems and technology services to Canada Post.

With more and more shipping alternatives (and alternatives to shipping), Canada Post executives understood that leveraging IT—and a separate IT organization—could spur innovative customer solutions, generate new revenue streams and increase productivity. Toward these ends, it tasked Innovapost with three primary missions:

• Deliver world-class technology services and e-business solutions.
• Reduce IS/IT costs.
• Eliminate duplicate investments by the companies within Canada Post.

Canada Post decision makers also recognized that world-class IT would require a world-class IT organization, which is why they opted to outsource IT to Innovapost Inc. Innovapost teamed with CGI to provide their client’s IT Infrastructure and with Accenture to deliver important portions of their application development work. Since 2003, Innovapost has delivered to its clients more than $250 million in operational cost savings. For Canada Post alone, application support costs decreased by 20 percent, and infrastructure costs decreased by 30 percent.

When Innovapost was first formed, Accenture had been working for Canada Post for almost two decades. Depth and achievement—combined with deep knowledge of public service entities, the postal industry and extensive SAP, Oracle and Microsoft implementation skills (Accenture is one of SAP’s top “alliance partners”)—made Accenture the top pick as Innovapost’s preferred application-delivery resource. In October 2002, Accenture and Innovapost signed a 10-year application-development contract.

Since the formation of Innovapost, Accenture and Innovapost professionals have worked together on a wide variety of application-development programs— from concept formation to testing, implementation and multisite deployment. By implementing the Accenture industrialized delivery approach, Innovapost employees have benefited from more than 15 years of experience helping them to hone their skills to assume a larger percentage of development responsibility.

Six years into the contract, Innovapost technologists have become highly proficient with Accenture’s methodology, project management structure and testing tools and approaches, thereby creating continuous savings and further increasing the quality of technology services.

The Accenture/Innovapost team has implemented almost every tool SAP makes, including solutions for order to cash, customer relationship management, business information warehouse, finance and procurement. Accenture also worked with Innovapost to replace Canada Post’s track and trace system with SAP Event Management and orchestrated an SAP Human Resources implementation that now provides paychecks to all of Canada Post’s 66,000 employees.

Accenture further implemented a wide variety of custom-developed postal applications leveraging technology from Oracle and Microsoft. Accenture was the prime application development supplier for Canada Post’s Postal Transformation program that resulted in a revitalization of Canada Post’s core business of mail processing and delivery.

Better and faster customer service. Reduced costs. New revenue streams. All three of these achievements are linked to Accenture’s contributions to Innovapost’s application development efforts.

On the customer service side, Accenture helped Innovapost surpass its satisfaction targets in every year of operation since 2002. In fact, satisfaction among Innovapost’s clients has gone up every year since 2002.

On the cost side, Accenture helped Innovapost generate savings for Canada Post by boosting Innovapost’s IT staff capabilities, accelerating IT development and implementation times, and more fully leveraging SAP experience, solutions and skills to enhance technology value and reuse. Innovapost also has benefited from a highly efficient and consistent project estimating methodology.

Last, but not least, Accenture played a significant role in helping Innovapost complete new project work. The highest profile example is a multifaceted IT assignment for Purolator, Canada’s largest courier company. Working together, Accenture and Innovapost coordinated Purolator’s order to cash, time management and BI SAP installations. Accenture also helped develop a new, more competitive pricing approach that assisted the company in delivering certain services more efficiently.

The bottom line is that every year since the contract was signed, the value Accenture provides is understood more acutely—even though the cost of its services decreases as Innovapost personnel assume a larger percentage of the application-development workload.