Hermes' CIO isn't letting existing legacy systems slow change

Hermes is transforming itself for the 21st century, and 'scalable' is the name of the game

Every industry is going through digital transformation, but some are notoriously resistant to it - whether because of customers, employees or the simple fact that digital ‘doesn't add value'.

The parcel industry is one of those slow-to-change sectors, but transformation is gathering momentum. Chris Ashworth, CIO of delivery giant Hermes, is fighting to bring the business into the digital world.

"I came into Hermes and realised that we had a big legacy problem, like a number of our competitors… That challenge of ‘How do I turn a legacy business into a 21st-century business?' is facing a lot of my peers."

Hermes' IT department recently won the Digital Team of the Year category at Computing's Digital Technology Leaders' Awards, for its work on the Digital Futures programme: a move to modernise the business from the ground up.

Scalable IT is vital for the logistics industry, which has to cope with daily peaks in demand, as well as huge surges at certain times of the year. Ashworth said, "Whatever we do at Hermes we want to make sure we can do it on the busiest day, hour, minute at peak - so a lot of the stuff we were doing in our digital transformation was giving us that grunt."

Part of that shift was all of the legwork done to get the back-end systems ready, and shift to a consumption-based model:

"[We moved] our infrastructure into the cloud, making it consumption-based, changing point-to-point, batch-driven interfaces into real-time APIs and microservices, and driving a big data strategy.

"These were all foundations - but after doing that it was all behind the scenes, not a lot of it was customer-facing, or forward-facing for our clients. We started looking at how we were going to expose the new 21st-century Hermes to the outside world."

A redesigned website and cloud-based CMS served as the starting point for that, but judges at the Awards highlighted the work that the Hermes team had done with tracking, sending and returns.

We've designed a UI that allows a parcel to be returned within three clicks

Customers, Ashworth said, want constant reassurance about the state of their delivery, and so it was critical to get this project-in-a-project right. Hermes already offered tracking, and as part of Digital Futures added a new feature called Preferences, which it intends to expand over the next 12 months. These are a way for a customer to control the delivery if they're not available:

"[Preferences] start off with a safe place, which the customer can confirm; or a neighbour - they can divert to a neighbour of their choice. Once we've got that we'll confirm it to give the customer that assurance, and once we leave that parcel we'll provide assurance to that customer, either by photo or proof of signature, and then a Geocode.

"All of this is available in real-time of course, because of the work we've done underpinning it. There's no cut-off; if we're within 30 seconds of delivering a parcel a customer can still contact us, change their preference and it'll be sent to the handheld terminal with our courier, who can affect that delivery."

If anything, returns were even more important to perfect, because "You always find that returning a parcel is a lot harder than it should be," said Ashworth. The new system, allowing a parcel to be returned in three clicks, will go live in early August.

What you're seeing with Digital Futures is very much the start of the journey, not the end of it

The returns deliverable is complemented by a new print-and-pay-in-store device, developed by the Innovation Team (using agile prototyping) in just five days. Already available in about two-thirds of Hermes shops, it will reach all 4,500 this year. For people who don't have a home printer, they can now take a PIN number, or a QR code on a smartphone, into the store and print the label there.

Later this year - the aim is September - Hermes will launch an app that is complementary to the website and supports the print-in-store device through a digital wallet.

"We've been talking about our digital strategy for a while… What you're seeing with Digital Futures is very much the start of the journey, not the end of it. There's a hell of a lot of innovation coming along over the next one, two, three years," Ashworth told us.