How Yodel plans to spend £20m on IT transformation

Yodel CIO Adam Gerrard plans complete overhaul of delivery company's IT infrastructure

Black Friday didn't used to mean much to UK shoppers until a couple of years ago, when suddenly the American Thanksgiving-based retail nightmare - and its online equivalent "Cyber Monday" - seemed to hit our shores in a big way.

While fisticuffs in Asda over large-screen televisions characterises Black Friday in the media in the UK, for companies like parcel delivery company Yodel, the massive challenge of making deliveries turn up on time easily makes it the most fraught two days of the year.

Yodel CIO Adam Gerrard has a desire to "put some rationality back into retail" as, currently, "the entire logistics industry goes into meltdown" around events like Black Friday.

As a result, since arriving at Yodel as CIO in July 2014, Gerrard - whose CV includes stints at Avis, Late Rooms and Thomas Cook, as well as one at supply-chain solutions firm CHEP Logistics - has made it his mission to make Yodel a more connected company.

Gerrard tells Computing he joined Yodel for two reasons. "The first was the technology challenge, which was massive," he says.

"It's an organisation that's been brought together by the merger of DHL Domestic and Home Delivery Network [both parcel delivery firms] in 2010. Their systems were never consolidated. There was no integration and that left quite a lot of challenges for the business in terms of the pace of change," he says.

"Because it's not just about changing one system and moving forwards, it's about changing multiple systems and linking them together," he adds.

That didn't just crimp the company's agility, but the age of both systems also posed other challenges, too. For example, one system uses an Informix database backend, which uses Uniface, the venerable programming language and front-end developer tool.

Harking from "ye olde world of mainframe", as Gerrard puts it, Informix is around 35 years old. "The newer one," adds Gerrard, is Oracle-based. These systems were used in tandem, to some degree, for the "entire lifecycle of tracking a parcel", says Gerrard.

That included: "How you get a parcel into our network from a client perspective, all the way through to the logistics of sorting it, transporting it to the right place in the UK, and the last-mile deliveries, as well as customers tracking their parcels."

Parallel lives

The "big technical challenge" for Gerrard, since joining, has been trying to find a way to keep these two key systems running, while attempting to bring them together and update them.

Gerrard insists he is not "anti-legacy". At Avis, he says, it was decided that the mainframe could be "left to do what it was good at, and you'd still do a change every 30 days. And you wouldn't try to do continuous integration, but we put the right things around it to make sure we were flexible and agile as a business".

Gerrard compares his business needs to those of Biffa CIO David Gooding, who told Computing a couple of years back that he believes a "legacy" system can be completely acceptable when treated correctly and supported by more modern plugins.

"But because we've got two of those systems, to do anything is very, very difficult. So you either consolidate, which would open the question of whether or not you're even able to do that in this day and age, with such old technology and the type of skills you'd need. Or, are you going to do a replacement programme and put in something new? That's the way we're going."

So, Gerrard is ushering in a £20m IT transformation programme.

"That's split 50/50 between modernising the physical infrastructure - storage, compute, network and end-user devices, security services, authentication, and the whole piece, as it's all legacy - and swapping out those two older systems and implementing something which, off the shelf, doesn't cost that much money," says Gerrard.

But the hybridisation needed to integrate a new system into "everything else [Yodel] does" is, says Gerrard, where the true expense emerges.

The piece of software Gerrard is using is Perform, by Canadian software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider Descartes. Snapped up by Descartes in 2014 as part of its acquisition of Airclic, Perform drives mobile communication and proof-of-delivery features through delivery drivers' hand-held devices.

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How Yodel plans to spend £20m on IT transformation

Yodel CIO Adam Gerrard plans complete overhaul of delivery company's IT infrastructure

Gerrard became familiar with Descartes' technology while working at Avis, but still carried out a full tendering process before selecting Perform. "We shortlisted three - it was a very difficult process," he says.

"In this industry, nobody has taken that leap forwards to doing something this innovative. You don't want to do all this stuff yourself, but I was keen to buy off-the-shelf if at all possible, as it makes sense to not reinvent the wheel."

The infrastructure upgrade has been split into three sections, which Gerrard is calling "Get Well", "Get Fit" and "Get Strategic". Currently, Yodel is still at the "getting well" stage.

Sort centres - the central point of a parcel journey - are set to go live before the Black Friday peak this year, in phase one, with phase two involving service centres, which is where the parcels end up after they've been sorted, before being given to drivers.

Many Yodel staff, says Gerrard, use "older systems, and there's lots of passion and attachment to those systems", with the education process proving a challenge, he admits.

However, at a recent training day, Gerrard reflects how a physical parcel delivery exercise was carried out among a group of employees using empty boxes. It used both the "old way" and the "new way", and the parcel actually got there much quicker using the newer processes.

"This isn't a business that's tech savvy," he explains.

"You give some of our drivers a technology like Windows 10, and they'd ask ‘What do I do with that?' But at the same time, many of their personal phones are better technology than ours. And that's why having the Windows ecosystem is such a good thing.

"So if we could get it to work on a mobile phone, that would be great, but it's very different technology to what we have."

Upgrading the end-point

"We're trying to drive process change at the same time as system change. IT systems are, at the end of the day, just automated processes," he says.

A highlight of this process change, he adds, could come via a company-wide adoption of connected Windows systems. There are also what Gerrard describes as "some very old PCs" on the Yodel network, which will be replaced with new Windows devices.

"I'm swapping them out and trying to make us more mobile - we have 60 locations people can work from, and they still have desktops, or they're lugging suitcases around to carry laptops," he laughs.

Always on the look-out for use cases involving the under-used Windows Store and largely forgotten Windows Enterprise Store, in which companies can build their own in-house app shops, Computing asks whether Gerrard is considering attacking the "low-tech" outlook of many employees via the Windows app route.

"We're trying," he says, highlighting the integration challenge. Yodel is also not as close to a BYOD model as he'd ideally like. "Our end-user apps are not of the kind of calibre or capability to be rolled out as a BYOD solution at the moment," he admits.

"Some of that stems from the legacy aspects of it, the fact that things are built in a very specific way so that you need to know how to use them. But you don't download something to your phone and then expect to go on a three-day training course to learn how to use it," he says.

While Gerrard says that some of those applications will be "sorted out" in the near future, and that BYOD isn't off the cards, Yodel's 150-person IT department is first pursuing a Windows 8 and Windows 10-based device strategy for its 5,000 staff.

That number can rise to as many as 16,000 at peak times, such as Black Friday and Christmas, when the number of temporary workers it employs balloons. The strategy therefore needs to support older applications, as well as integrating with other new services, such as Perform. And then there's Teradata, which Yodel is increasingly using for analytics.

"In general, we've gone down the Windows Phone route," he says. "We've started providing Windows Phones to everyone in the business, and we're building apps around that. We already have Windows-based hand-held devices for drivers and sorters, and some of that will be refreshed as well," he says.

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How Yodel plans to spend £20m on IT transformation

Yodel CIO Adam Gerrard plans complete overhaul of delivery company's IT infrastructure

Gerrard explains that "the Windows piece does make sense" for Yodel, where several Windows devices are already used, ranging from Windows XP and Windows 2000 all the way through to Windows 8, but mostly running on desktops and older, heavyweight laptops.

"But the way we work, with people having to leave their office to have conversations and then go back to their office to carry on working, lends itself much more to mobility," he explains. "What we're standardising on is a Windows 8-cum-Windows 10 way of working, with the mobile phone, tablet, laptops and desktops."

Yodel is therefore adopting the Microsoft Surface tablet for a wide range of users.

"We're looking at Surface 3 wherever it best applies, not just for management. We've got use cases for [delivery vehicle] drivers - all the service centre managers already have [Surface 3s]. They're now fully mobile and can work on the shop floor with their Teradata reports on the tablets."

Gerrard is also planning to expand the provision of in-house applications. Currently, Yodel mainly deploys "classic" applications running in the Win 32 environment, but he hopes to start moving them into the Windows 8-style "Modern" sandbox, which can now also run on the Win 32 desktop in Windows 10.

"We're building app-type wrappers around certain things," he says.

Parcel analytics

Security-wise, Gerrard acknowledges that having the likes of Windows 2000 and XP on the network "puts a strain on security", and he's also aware that moves towards tighter encryption requires "fairly modern technology in order to cope with it. But we've already done an awful lot at the backend to support that," he says.

"On the data layer, we took the decision 18 months ago to standardise on Teradata as our analytics platform," he says. "Pulling all our data into one place and having one single version of the truth is great, but it's also helped shape the data architecture moving forwards.

"So, we've now been able to build operational data stores that feed from the right element of Teradata. This means that when we come to build applications, we can get the data from the right place really quickly, and accelerate that whole process. Teradata has been fantastic."

Gerrard is particularly happy with how Yodel - via Teradata - has been able to bring together several different reporting dashboards to "make sure people have the right information to make decisions".

There are, he says, three different "camps" of clients for Yodel: actual clients, who "pay us to exist by moving their products"; the consumer, who receives them, but still needs access to some of the same analytics; and, staff and third-person employees (such as self-employed delivery staff), who manage it all and, of course, also need access in a number of meaningful ways.

"By thinking about data first, we've been able to design the right security layer to put on top. But we're also able to build applications in the right way to feed into those applications. Rather than six, we now have only one place the data comes in. So clients can see everything in just one window. It's going to be a massive positive."

With 40 different security policies for "physical security and logical security", which have taken the past 18 months to finalise, Gerrard won't even tell Computing where the company's two data centres reside ("one's inside the M25 and one's outside, and that's all I'm saying," he says).

"We're co-locating at the moment, but clearly as we move to SaaS there's less dependence on data centres," he says. "We've had them for a while, but are looking at making some changes in the future according to our changing infrastructure."

Ideally, he adds, he'd use SaaS for everything. "But there are some exceptions... One of the good things about our handheld terminals at the moment is that they can work offline. We need full national data coverage [for delivery drivers to stay online], and not many of the 3G providers these days can offer that. They all claim 99 per cent, but you'll notice nobody ever says 100," he says.

"But it's possible to offline for a while and upload the data later when you have a connection - with SaaS, that will work."

And the use of Teradata has helped Yodel to cut back on storage, using the recovered resources to reduce backup and restore times, too - all part of the ongoing "Get Well" policy.

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How Yodel plans to spend £20m on IT transformation

Yodel CIO Adam Gerrard plans complete overhaul of delivery company's IT infrastructure

"We've gone from a one gigabyte-per-second storage area network to 10 GB/sec, and we can get back-up in minutes onto SSDs. It takes a little while more to restore, of course, but it's very quick," says Gerrard.

"I think we snapshotted four of the main databases already, and we will have that on for all but one for the main trading periods.

"All we need to do now is to finish the integration, and really make that hybrid. We are still doing work on the databases, and we also need to keep preparing to retire systems.

"You put new things in, but we need to work on how we [physically] work, what we test and how we can switch things off in the right way. There's an awful lot of planning going into that."

Skilling up

Another element of change that Yodel has identified as Teradata's centralised analytics potential becomes apparent is staff skills. In terms of BI and analytics, Gerrard feels Yodel is currently "at the edge of what the technical guys can do", and needs people who can run through data and understand its commercial value. "That's where the data scientist-type role could emerge," he says.

"We're also working with the British Computer Society (BCS) on SFIAplus - their framework for defining the skills, competencies and the capabilities you need in an IT organisation," he adds. "So we're arranging with the whole IT team to map out what competencies they have today, and what they'll need in the future."

Overall, Gerrard regards Yodel as a business that is a "disruptor to digital, rather than being disrupted by digital".

He continues: "You've got all these startups popping up online that are selling products and aggregating resources. But you still need to deliver them. They still need physically taking from A to B.

"So if we can modernise the way we work and the way we think about doing these things, it's really going to add value to that whole customer journey on a digital level, from end to end."