Context
Pickup Services operated digital services across a large multi-country last-mile network. Customer notifications, parcel tracking, parcel shops, lockers and delivery partners all contributed to the same customer journey, even though the underlying services and suppliers were different.
The work combined high-volume platform delivery with new digital propositions, so reliability and operational continuity mattered just as much as feature delivery.
Scale and complexity
The customer-notification platform operated across approximately 40,000 pickup points in 26 countries and processed around 600,000 emails, 300,000 SMS and 1,000 voice messages per day.
Delivery involved internal teams, external technology providers, transport partners and customer-facing services, with changes needing to work across multiple channels and operational contexts.
My role
I managed the notification platform’s delivery and evolution with an annual budget of approximately €500,000, covering requirements, dependencies, testing, releases, go-live and operational documentation.
Alongside the core platform, I led parcel-tracking and customer-journey initiatives and coordinated new delivery concepts involving partners including Chronopost, STUART, Cdiscount and Monoprix.
How I structured delivery
For the notification platform, I connected business requirements to technical dependencies, release readiness and service continuity rather than treating each enhancement as a standalone change.
I also represented the notification workstream during modernisation of the wider parcel-lifecycle platform, coordinating impacts as components moved from Oracle, PL/SQL and ASP.NET MVC towards MongoDB, .NET Core, RabbitMQ and Docker.
For new customer propositions, the delivery model extended across several organisations. Success depended on making the full journey work — ordering, dispatch, partner hand-offs, notifications, tracking and final delivery — rather than optimising only one component.
Key delivery judgement
Last-mile propositions can look simple to the customer while depending on a large number of operational and technical hand-offs underneath.
The important delivery discipline was therefore to manage the end-to-end customer journey and the interfaces between partners, while protecting the reliability of the high-volume services already in production.
Outcome
The notification platform continued to support high-volume communications across the international pickup network while new tracking, locker and delivery propositions were introduced.
An under-30-minute home-delivery proof of concept delivered with Chronopost, STUART and Cdiscount received the 2018 FEVAD award for best innovation, demonstrating that the programme could combine operational reliability with experimentation in new delivery models.