The Brief
This already established agency contracted Carrot Media to undertake a project for a large offshore postal carrier. The main challenge was the postal carrier was losing over £1m a year in revenue from large retailers miscalculating postage. They wanted to build an EBilling system in close consultancy with a few of their Bluechip clients to ensure so that all post was calculated correctly.
Previously, customers were expected to fill out a paper ‘docket’, which contained a list of all the items they were posting, along with a manually calculated price based on their rate sheet. Of course this led to problems where out of date rate sheets were being used, or mistakes were made. This resulted in significant expenditure to the carrier sending post that was not charged for, or was undercharged.
What happened next
Working closely with the carrier and their clients, we were able to develop a bespoke EBilling web application to handle all of their Bulk Mail inputs. The multi-user system provided user levels for Staff Admins, Clients (Bulk Mailers) and Suppliers. Admins were able to maintain the data behind the site which included Formats, Destinations, Tariff Types, Tariffs, Users, User Groups.
Bulk Mailers are able to use an AJAX interface to add new rows to their dockets, with drop down fields being populated with data dynamically based on their selections. This included validation to ensure that tariffs were selected, and that minimum weight & volume limits were met.
Bulk Mailers can also upload their dockets by .csv or .xml file. Once the dockets have been entered, the system is able to calculate the prices accurately using the latest data and produce a PDF invoice for the customer.
The data from all of the dockets submitted would then be synchronised with the carriers internal Sage systems to ensure their client accounts were kept up to date. In the case of certain tariffs, the system was also directly linked in with other carriers to inform them of postings ahead of time.
This included working on the development of a module to link in with Royal Mail Tracked, to dynamically create labels and barcodes in PDF format to be printed out and applied to the packets before dispatch. This required the development of code to actually create a barcode image to exact specification (to allow for scanning once printed) dynamically, based on the code provided.
Notes from our Technical Director
The system we developed for this carrier is now handling over £20million worth of transactions every year and is estimated to have saved over £1m /year in lost revenue as a result of it’s implementation. Obviously this is a fantastic result for all involved and due to the nature of the underlying system, it is perfectly suited to extension in the future as the business grows and adapts to a changing marketplace.
The carrier is able to manage and update the data sets behind the system that provide the tariff logic and pricing. This data is also linked in with the front end of the site, (built in Concrete5) to provide postage calculators for Business & Bulk Mailers.
Final Screenshots:
