Posti

The new system is user-friendly and speeds up everyday work

 
 
 
DOWNLOAD CASE STUDY

Posti is your first choice for postal, logistics, and e-commerce services in Finland. Posti manages the flow of commerce and everyday life in 11 countries. Posti's net sales in 2013 amounted to EUR 1,977 million. Posti employs approximately 26,000 members of staff and delivers corporate services under the Posti brand, while the Posti brand is used for services targeted at consumers in Finland.
Posti_Group.svg (1)
Challenge

Fragmented payment transactions created a lot of work and time was wasted correcting mistakes. The introduction of SEPA meant that a renewal of the system to meet the demands of international payment transactions could not be avoided.

  
Solution

Posti’s payment transactions in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, Norway, Germany, and Poland are now centralized through the Payment Factory in the form of ISO 20022 payment transactions. Payment Factory services are handled at Posti’s payment transaction unit, which also takes care of the majority of Posti’s financial management processes. 

  

Payments were previously taken care of locally and with various systems, so it was obviously very difficult to keep track of everything. Now we have a system that functions smoothly: all payments go through the same process, which is the same in each country.

Katriina Järvenpää 
Financial Development, Senior Manager

  

Complete Control With Centralized Payment Transaction Solution

 

Katriina Järvenpää, who is responsible for financial development projects at Posti Group, is very satisfied. System problems are now a thing of the past and the Group’s new payment transaction software solution is functioning smoothly on its own.

The Payment Factory solution handles the majority of Posti Group company's payment processes centrally and in a controlled way. Let’s return to the fall of 2011 for a moment. The Posti Group’s payment transaction system was heavy and multidimensional and had become more and more challenging to manage over the years.

We constantly had problems with payment transactions outside Finland in particular, and the payment transaction system that was in use at that time was no longer able to adapt to Posti Group’s diverse needs.

Problems were reported all the time, and payment transaction experts had to spend a great deal of time and effort solving these problems.

Katriina Järvenpää, Financial Development, Senior Manager at Posti Group.

When Järvenpää was later faced with the transition to SEPA, she decided to take action and look for a flexible and efficient solution to help improve Posti Group’s payment transaction processes.

The solution was provided by our centralized payment transaction software that has been a big hit with everyone.

We are very satisfied with this solution. It felt like the right choice straight away. They have so much in-depth knowledge and it has been a pleasure working with them. They have dealt with all our special requests and provided help every time we have needed it.

Katariina Järvenpää

Payment transaction experts play a key role. Posti was, of course, already familiar with our services. Our financial management services center was already responsible for Posti Group’s accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger and payment transactions. The payment transaction experts at the services center also use the Payment Factory and they were involved with the implementation project from the very beginning.

The payment transaction experts tell us that the new system is user-friendly and speeds up everyday work.

Outi Väätäinen, team leader at Nomentia who looks after Posti Group’s payment transactions.

The first project was carried out at Posti’s companies in the Baltic countries, because various companies were implementing SAP at the time. As Payment Factory was implemented there first, we were able to test the new system and then you would make any necessary changes whenever needed.

When we were satisfied that the Payment Factory functioned well in the Baltic countries, we were then able to replicate the system for implementation in the other countries.

Outi Väätäinen

More than 15,000 payments a day

Posti’s payment volumes are huge: the number of daily transactions can exceed 15,000. Posti’s financial processes are taken care of with SAP ERP software, which collects all the purchase invoices from the systems in Posti’s international units and then our solution transforms the data produced into SEPA-compatible ISO 20022 C2B payment messages. Payment Factory currently handles Posti’s payment transactions in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, Norway, Germany and Poland. The largest payment batches are processed as SEPA payments.

Direct banking connections

From the beginning one of the Posti’s demands was to have harmonized bank connections covering Posti countries.

Posti wanted to have streamlined secured channels for daily communication.

When the basis is solid it is easier to take in new accounts to the structure. With this solution we were able to have the needed coverage and improve straight-through processing.

Katriina Järvenpää