Royal Mail

Supporting and web-enabling legacy systems

The success of an advertising campaign in promoting anything from the launch of a new chocolate bar to the opening of a major supermarket usually depends on how well the message is targeted to a particular audience.

Royal Mail's home delivery system enables advertisers to send promotional material to specific areas - from television regions to individual post codes - on pre-agreed dates. The delivery system runs on an IBM mainframe which holds details of all the postal delivery routes throughout the UK. It identifies if there is any vacant capacity and checks that the proposed weight of any promotional mailshot is within officially agreed guidelines.

Parity has been given the responsibility for maintaining this complex home delivery system. It was a significant step for Royal Mail to transfer responsibility for this historic legacy system to an outside supplier and initially there were concerns that it could be disruptive for the business. But the transfer of responsibilities has worked well and Parity is able to act as a seamless extension to Royal Mail's in-house IT team.

explains Peter Rusling, Parity's strategic relationship director.

As an extension of its support and maintenance responsibilities, Parity was also invited to help web-enable the home delivery system to upgrade the service and to make it more flexible and accessible to major advertising clients.

Although Royal Mail required the system to be accessible by a browser, the in-house IT team worked with Parity to ensure that the presentation of information on the screen remained the same as it did through a direct connection. This move was designed to minimise disruption and to make the transition as smooth as possible.

Throughout the web-enablement process, Parity's team worked closely with Royal Mail's internal technical architecture group who decided that Microsoft COM+ components should be used for the middleware. Some of the core generic components were developed in-house at Royal Mail while the remaining application specific components were developed by Parity's team.

explains Denis Bell, Parity's project manager, who adds that the middleware components had to be carefully tuned in order to ensure that the system ran at the expected speeds.

The web-enabled home delivery system can theoretically be accessed from anywhere and it is being continually supported by Parity through this next phase of its life cycle.

The internet is currently provoking a corporate systems shake-up and many large organisations are having to oversee the often thorny task of web-enabling their historic legacy systems. Peter Rusling points out that Parity has now built up a considerable body of specialist experience in this field.

With Royal Mail's home delivery system, Parity was able to manage the past life of the applications system while at the same time taking it successfully into the future to meet the new demands of the business. Rusling says,

A Royal Mail spokeswoman adds: