La Poste is France’s largest courier service, processing almost 500 million parcels, and operating in France itself, as well as five overseas locations. The state-owned delivery service employs over 220,000 people – making it one of the largest employers in France – and is 100% state-owned. It operates four core divisions: Courier services, GeoPost (the […]
La Poste is France’s largest courier service, processing almost 500 million parcels, and operating in France itself, as well as five overseas locations.
The state-owned delivery service employs over 220,000 people – making it one of the largest employers in France – and is 100% state-owned. It operates four core divisions: Courier services, GeoPost (the parent of DPD), La Banque Postale, and Grand Public en Numerique.
But one challenge for the firm is that its IT department spans the entire operation and all of its services.
Internally, the IT team manages this by providing a private cloud service, which operates across the division. Cloud services it offers include infrastructure-as-a-service, containers-as-a-service (virtual machines), platform-as-a-service, and additional computing power (bare metal) through physical services.
This breaks down as 900 projects hosted on La Poste’s cloud, including 31,000 containers, and 12,000 virtual machines.
“Since 2020 we have processed over 1.5 million operations,” explains La Poste’s full-stack developer Matthieu Dubin. But until two years ago, this was all being run on a legacy IT system, causing challenges for the company’s employees and users.
Bringing in help
Prior to Camunda, La Poste Groupe used its own internal system to manage workflows, but this became “technically slow and complex”, explains Ludovic Buteau, especially “with threads and pulling mechanisms”. He spoke to TechInformed at CamundaCon in Amsterdam.
“Our processes were very complex and moved by pulling scheduled tasks, which was inefficient,” he adds. “If a thread failed or stopped, we often lost the workflow state.
“Our workflows were like a black box, hard to understand and follow.”
Then, around 18 months ago, Poste Group’s cloud unit decided to overhaul its approach to orchestration, ditching its custom-made engine for something more event-driven.
“We wanted it to be more reliable and variable,” adds Dubin. “We started by trying to make a newer version of the engine, but soon realised it wasn’t going to meet our needs.
“We decided to widen our scope across the entire organisation to see what our core business was – deploying and managing resources.”
Dubin explains that La Poste Group opted to integrate Camunda because of its promise to provide high availability and zero downtime.
Camunda is a workflow automation and orchestration platform primarily used by businesses to design, execute, and improve business processes.
The French delivery firm integrated Camunda into its hybrid workflow architecture across the two data centres it owns and operates. In its first region, the organisation uses APIs to launch workflows within Camunda, and this then manages microservices – split into XaaS microservices, which give feedback to users; and AAP microservices which is in charge of managing resources such as virtual machines.
Camunda’s Tasklist allows La Poste to manage and streamline workflows that require human intervention, ensuring efficient collaboration between automated processes and human workers.
La Poste Group had two major goals when it first decided to partner with Camunda.
“Firstly, there was a technical challenge,” explains Buteau. “That was how we can operate across our two regions (data centres). And the second question was is this the right tool to orchestrate a workflow?”
The first trial involved trying to overcome one of the biggest challenges the delivery firm had found with its previous system: Creating and managing virtual machines within its existing architecture. This was successful, so then the focus shifted to scaling up this capability.
“We have hundreds of APIs that we use to operate the system, but the vast majority of these are used for deploying our resources,” adds Dubin. “They aren’t super complicated, but our databases span multiple regions and we also run a lot of single task jobs. We haven’t migrated all of this fully, but we see the potential to go further.”
Changing from the internal system, which had been designed “by developers, for developers” to Camunda has allowed the team to have much greater insight into the organisation’s processes.
“Previously, it was like a black box. We could see where a process started, and where it ended,” explains Buteau. “We couldn’t see it operating live, and we could only see outcomes when it was over.” This, he adds, is despite Poste Group being an organisation that is full of experts in a variety of tech fields, from virtualisation to networking.
“Camunda came with the model graphic interface. This really helped us to finally have the support for it; to collaborate and really finally be able to talk about what is really happening within our processes so we can improve them.”
La Poste Group’s Automated future
Now, Poste Group is planning to expand its use of Camunda, by potentially adding a third region, which will help with reliability and robustness; introducing a fully automated workflow system that can trigger failure actions automatically in case of a lost data centre; and leveraging the additional data provided by using the Camunda system to improve workflows.
The team is also keeping an eye on developments with AI.
“We are really deterministic,” says Buteau. “I haven’t seen the type of deployment in resource management yet that shows where and how we would integrate AI. But if we see a use case for something like incident management, then it could be part of our journey.”
What advice would the Poste Group team offer to other internal IT teams looking to overhaul process management and switch out their internal systems for those of a vendor, such as Camunda?
“Take some height,” says Dubin. “Then iterate.” He goes on to explain that it is important to find a relevant use case to try initially before applying new tools across entire organisational workflows. “This means you can see what is happening, what the impact is, and adjust it.”
This, he adds, has allowed Poste Group to focus on the business case, and focus on new end goals at every step.
