What is Swiss Post looking for?

The population in conurbations is increasing, while available space and infrastructure often remains the same. Especially in urban areas, this is resulting in higher traffic volumes. By contrast, parcel volumes are constantly on the increase and customers are looking for more flexible and faster delivery – such as on demand, or on the same day. This presents challenges to logistics services providers such as Swiss Post. Logistics processes need to become more flexible, more connected and better utilized.

Swiss Post is at its customers’ front doors on a daily basis. The challenge is to use this advantage on the last mile. That’s why Swiss Post is developing and testing different solution concepts such as same-day delivery, delivery via microhubs and/or alternative delivery vehicles. For urban logistics, PostLogistics is also looking for new logistics concepts that are driven by data models.

Digital building includes all building data that is created, updated and managed during the planning, construction and operation of a building. Building data includes data from sources such as SAP ERP, CAFM, building management systems and sensors. Merging traditional IT systems with the world of buildings provides a basis for automation, optimization, monitoring, security and convenience. The aim of the digital building development area is to implement smart services for the various stakeholders (tenants, users, operators or other Swiss Post units etc.), in order to predict faults proactively, to monitor operations in real time and to receive predictive insights into building systems and facilities, including energy management, energy consumption and user comfort.

Smart assistance refers to virtual assistants that can perform tasks or services for an individual. The interaction between human and machine can take place in writing or orally. Virtual assistants can and should interact with other systems as well.

Swiss Post is working to find out how chatbots can take over repetitive customer service tasks. The idea is to free up the customer service department and to allow staff to focus on more pressing and intellectually challenging tasks. 

Swiss Post is looking for new technologies that can help it to understand unstructured data, extract key information and then to process this flexibly in backend systems. In doing so, the initial focus is on unstructured text information that can be used for automating processes and improving the customer experience. The technologies must be able to be connected in a way that is flexible and fit into end-to-end workflow solutions. Ideally, the solutions will cover needs in both English and German.

How can the growing need for mobility in cities be met? How can mobility be secured in peripheral and thinly populated areas? How can public transport become more personal and flexible? Sustainability solutions are being sought for these issues.

In cities, cars are stuck in traffic jams. In rural areas, there are gaps in public transport service. Whether shared mobility, autonomous driving, or drone taxis: technological trends are providing promising innovative approaches for revolutionizing passenger transport. However, often in these discussions it’s the technology which is the focus – but in the end, it will be the user who decides which mode of transport he or she will choose for what purpose. This means that the individual must become the focus. Innovative new value-added services aim to make the mobility of the individual at the start and the end of the travel chain sustainable, flexible and attractive. The new services are also designed to tap into additional sources of revenue for PostBus.

What PostBus is already doing: kollibri.ch, smartshuttle.ch, publibike.ch

Security is important to the Swiss and plays a central role in people’s lives. Evidence from various studies confirms this. The increasing need for security is being driven by the growth of cyber-crime, financial uncertainty and extreme natural phenomena. 

Swiss Post wants to help increase the security of the Swiss population in both the physical and digital worlds. Physical goods such as jewellery or cash need to be transported safely; real estate and infrastructure need to be monitored. Digital information such as healthcare data, digital identities and passwords must be managed securely. For “trust services”, openness, transparency and honesty are core values. Swiss Post represents these values, while also having specific capabilities that help to increase the security of the population.

More and more, intelligent objects will transmit data, and make and settle payments autonomously in future. Automated payment and billing modules that are integrated into hardware, and objects authorized to carry out payments are paving the way for new business models. A key focus within this is on the secure transmission and storage of the data.

The transformation of the economy from being driven by money to being driven by data opens up completely new opportunities for Swiss Post and PostFinance to expand their core competencies within this new field. Swiss Post collects and maintains customer and logistics data, PostFinance manages bank accounts and processes transactions. These tasks generate huge quantities of data. However, data from which you cannot learn any information is completely worthless. Products and services are also worthless when their customers have no confidence in them and will not supply their data to them for this reason.

How could we use data (whether this is internal, external, Group or cross-company data) in the future as a design medium to create new data-driven products and services for our customers? What (new) customer needs would these products/services cover? How could companies monetize data in future, in partnership with their customers?