A 100-year Old Business’ Digital Evolution with Apigee API Management
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Editor’s note: James Fairweather, chief innovation officer at Pitney Bowes, has played a key role in modernizing the product offerings at this century-old global provider of innovative shipping solutions for businesses of all sizes. In today’s post, he discusses some key challenges the Pitney Bowes team overcame during its digital transformation, and some of the benefits it has enjoyed from building new digital competencies.
Pitney Bowes will celebrate its 100th birthday in April 2020. Over the past century, we’ve enjoyed great success in markets associated with shipping and mailing. Yet, as with so many established and successful enterprises, we faced slowing growth in the markets that served us so well for so long. While package growth was accelerating, the mail market was declining, creating opportunities and challenges.
To change our growth trajectory and “build a bridge” to Pitney Bowes’ second century, we needed to offer more value to our clients. We needed to move to growth markets, and that required new digital competencies. In 2015, we began a deliberate journey to transform our services, including shipping and location intelligence, for the digital world and make them available via the cloud. We learned a lot throughout this journey. In this post we’ll take a look at three things, in particular, that led to the success of this project—and will help future projects succeed, as well.
Setting expectations and realistic milestones
Organizations tend to undertake product development with a sense of optimism—and it’s often not particularly realistic. You set out thinking something will take a certain amount of time and that you will incur a specific cost, but estimates in technology and development may be optimistic, and costs almost always incrementally increase throughout the development process.
With a digital transformation effort, there’s an additional challenge: You aren’t really heading to a well-defined destination, so the path your team takes can be even more ambiguous. Digital transformation doesn’t have an end state. It’s a process of constant evolution.
For these reasons, and more, it’s important to set informed, realistic expectations—in schedule, in budget, in project scope. It’s also critical that you identify milestones along the way, and recognize and celebrate when you reach them.
When you’re working on a massive, multi-year corporate transformation, after all, it can be hard to recognize that every little action you take each week, everything you win day-to-day, is a part of your progress, your change. So, it’s really important, as a leader, to bring consistency and execution discipline—and be able to point to the progress being made and celebrate accomplishments.
We did our best to follow this advice during our digital transformation. Late 2015 was a critical time for Pitney Bowes as we laid out the technology strategy that would get us to the next century. We were aware of the potential hazards that could arise. You set the strategy, celebrate its publication as an accomplishment… and then nothing happens. To avoid this issue, we broke our strategy out into specific tactics supported by numerous smaller, interim goals. When we started putting big, green checkmarks next to each accomplished milestone, people started realizing that we were making real progress, and were serious about our execution.
One key milestone, for example, was implementing an API management platform. This comprised several granular goals: Selecting a partner, training a subset of our 1,100 team members on the platform, and rolling out our first offering that was built on top of that capability.
We knew that an API platform would be a key part of our digital transformation for three major reasons. First, we had acquired several companies, but their technologies were difficult to share for use cases across the organization. Every time a team needed to use our geocoding or geoprocessing capability, for example, they had to spin up a new environment. By building these capabilities as APIs across the organization, it made it easy to democratize their usage and speed up development.
Secondly, we were running a big enterprise business system platform transformation program and wanted our product teams to be able to consume data from our back-end business systems. This meant that we needed a solid catalog of all these services, so new members of the team could easily find and use them.
Finally, we had a couple of business units that wanted to go to market with APIs. They had a business strategy that entailed selling a service or value, with a vision to build a platform or ecosystem around these capabilities. An API platform (specifically, Google Cloud’s Apigee API management platform) is a huge accelerant in enabling all three of these objectives—it’s how you do this well.
Reusability and the Commerce Cloud
The Apigee platform and team helped us build a key offering that arose from our digital transformation: the Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud. It’s a set of cloud-based solutions and APIs that are built on our assets and connect our new cloud solutions to our enterprise business systems, such as billing and package management.
Today, we have close to 200 APIs delivered from the Commerce Cloud in the areas of location intelligence, shipping, and global ecommerce. The Commerce Cloud isn’t just a success as a customer-facing platform, however. We often talk about whether our development teams themselves have leveraged its services when developing new products. These discussions help us understand whether a product team has thought through the digital capabilities we’ve already built, assessed which capabilities fits into its roadmap, and adopted the right technology, capabilities, and practices to align with our corporate digital transformation strategy.
Internal use of these shareable services shaves up to 70% off of our design cycles, because so many decisions are already made. Commerce Cloud adoption means you’ve gotten on the path internally, lowered the friction, and are aligned with the broader company digital transformation strategy.
Measuring success
We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished so far at Pitney Bowes. But pride only takes you so far. To determine a project’s success, you need to be able to measure it.
We do have some encouraging external measures: our percentage of revenue from new products climbed to roughly 20% of sales in 2018, compared to 5% back in 2012. And our Shipping APIs, which enable customers to integrate U.S. Postal Service capabilities into their own solutions, has gone from a standing start to an over $100 million business in a few years.
On top of those external results, our business has transformed. We’re no longer just participating in a one-time sale of a product, software, or services; we’re participating in transactions every day that drive client outcomes. The more you can improve the quality and effectiveness of those services, the more you and your client enjoy the benefits of the commercial relationship. That’s a very big business model transformation for Pitney Bowes.
We’ve also sped up our time to market and tightened our service-level agreements. But perhaps most importantly, we’ve developed and adopted a new set of internal processes and a mindset that helps us quickly adapt to changing market conditions. Again, digital transformation isn’t a destination. It’s really a set of processes that enable us to be nimble and keep building a bridge to Pitney Bowes’ future.
For more on the Pitney Bowes transformation, check out these videos and this case study.
Google Maps Platform Helps BungkusIT Fulfil its Promise of Deliveries in One Hour!
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Editor’s note: Today’s post is written by Hatim M, Chief Commercial Officer at BungkusIT. The on-demand delivery service delivers packages within the hour for one million customers across Malaysia and uses Google Maps Platform to create a seamless end-to-end delivery experience for its customers.
Imagine it’s the end of a long day at work, and you’re heading home for dinner as you look forward to a restful evening. Then just as you arrive at the doorstep, your phone buzzes with a message from a family member, asking if you could grab a carton of milk from the supermarket.
With moments like these in mind, we founded BungkusIT to alleviate the stress of everyday chores and give people a break from having to run seemingly mundane errands that can often be time-consuming. With so much to do and so few hours in a day, we want to make life simpler by providing our customers with an on-demand delivery service.
As a social enterprise, our mission is to create jobs and increase earning potential for BungkusIT roadies (those who run deliveries), while also increasing online visibility for local small and medium enterprises through an e-commerce platform. As such, we don’t charge merchants a fee for being featured on our app.
Our roadies help connect users with products and services that they need. Whether it’s picking up the keys you forgot, or buying a birthday cake for a loved one, our on-demand roadies can help accomplish your task quickly and efficiently. In fact, we’ve helped many seniors—a large and often underserved population—to run errands and provide last mile support.
Providing reliable service, 24/7
From the day we launched, our promise has always been to complete every task given to us within one hour. Google Maps Platform empowers us to fulfil this promise. We understand the importance of selecting a reliable mapping service from the get-go. After exploring different map products, we made the decision to go with Google Maps Platform due to its detailed and accurate location mapping system. With the support of our partner Searce, we’ve been able to quickly integrate all the relevant products on our platform and optimize our API calls.
On a day-to-day basis, our roadies rely on the Places API to navigate their journeys. It pinpoints the exact location set by customers so that our roadies can be sure they arrive at the correct destination. With so many small roads and alleys in Malaysia, it can be challenging to find the exact place based on an address. Dropping a pin on a specific location removes any confusion.
Because we price our services based on distance, it’s business critical to determine the exact distance of a location and the most efficient route to reach it. By automating that process with the Distance Matrix API, we can guarantee that customers don’t get overcharged, while making sure that we’re adequately compensated for our services.
Improving the user experience
At the end of the day, we want to make people’s lives easier. That’s why having an app that is intuitive is key. More than that, we want customers to be able to create a request as quickly as possible. By automatically completing the location a customer is typing after they’ve keyed in the first few characters, Place Autocomplete does that job for us.
As a fairly young company, we’ve got a long way to go. I believe that we’ll continue evolving alongside Google Maps Platform and exploring the new features it has to offer. We’re already talking to global brands to expand our services and I’m confident that with Google Maps Platform as our maps partner, we will go a long way.
For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.
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Modern web APIs allow businesses to build compelling experiences that generate, consume, and combine digital assets. They’ve become the foundation upon which digital business is built.
But the path to success can be unclear, rough, and challenging. The game has changed, after all, and this requires tossing out many of the rules by which you run your business.
You’re not alone. Other businesses have struggled down the path toward increased competitiveness, agility, and opportunity—and we, at Google Cloud, are privileged to partner with hundreds of customers across myriad industries as they gear up to go digital.
We’ve seen the successful decisions and strategies that have enabled companies to adapt to new digital realities. But we’ve also seen businesses make decisions that slowed, stymied, or, in some cases, reversed progress toward becoming an agile digital business.
There’s no one path to travel. There are many ways to make your business digital, but there are also many pitfalls. This is the survival guide to help navigate a smarter digital journey.
There’s one bit of advice we can offer above all else: GET STARTED. If you don’t take steps to adapt to the new competitive landscape and to your customers’ expectations, the very survival of your business is at risk.
Download the E-book to know more about the best and worst practices of how a business leads, measures, invests in, and executes an API initiative.
Woolaroo App and Vision AI are Helping Users Explore Native Languages
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One of the most vibrant elements of culture is the use of native languages and the time-honored tradition of storytelling. Anthropologists and linguists have been vocal on the role that language plays in the preservation of culture and how it contributes to the appreciation of heritage.
Unfortunately, of the more than 7,000 languages that are spoken around the globe, nearly 3,000 are at risk of disappearing. In fact, it’s estimated that on average a language becomes extinct every fourteen days. Google Arts & Culture realized that with some creative technology and partnering with language organisations, we could help create an interactive and educational tool to help promote them.
Enter Woolaroo, an open-source photo-translation platform powered by machine learning and image recognition. The application was built on Google Cloud to encourage users to explore endangered languages around the world. Users are able to take a picture of an object in real-time, and the application returns the word in its native language, along with its pronunciation.
Woolaroo was created with the philosophy that learning languages is greatly enhanced through engagement and context. By seeing an object in its environment, it’s easier to retain the information and then use it more naturally in conversation.
With the help of Googlers, Woolaroo was launched in 10 languages, including Calabrian Greek, Louisiana Creole, Maori and Yiddish. During the conception stage of the app, teams from Partner Innovation and Google Arts & Culture put out an open call to the rest of Google to see what lesser-known languages our employees spoke. They then worked with the individuals that responded to develop dictionaries that were reviewed by partner institutions to ensure translations were correct and consistent.
Woolaroo uses Google Cloud Vision API, which derives insights from images using AutoML or pre-trained models to quickly classify images into millions of predefined categories. This makes AI accessible and useful to more people as AutoML automates the training of these machine learning models.
Our team at Google Arts & Culture creates immersive experiences for people to learn about art, history, culture and more. We are committed to supporting the preservation of heritage and cultural landmarks – including spoken language – through the use of modern technology. The magic of Woolaroo is that it is open source, which means any person or organisation can use it to build something for their own endangered language. To learn about the efforts Google Arts & Culture is involved in, download the Google Arts & Culture app or visit our blog.
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While microservices are lauded as catalysts for speed and scale, the conversation is incomplete if it does not include APIs. Without APIs, microservices cannot be securely, reliably, and adaptably scaled across an organization or to outside partners. Moreover, because these APIs and their microservices are meant to be widely consumed and reused, it’s not enough for companies to merely create the APIs and move on. Rather, the APIs should be continually managed so the business can control how its microservices are accessed, generate insight into how they are used, and encourage reliability of its services.
As microservices grow beyond their original use cases and are being leveraged to share important functionality throughout the enterprises and even with external partners, the problem that arises is how this sharing creates challenges for teams trying to secure, monitor, understand usage of, and fully take advantage of microservices.
In this eBook we explore how leading enterprises are facing these challenges head-on and scaling their microservices strategies. Learn how APIs make it possible for microservices to be securely, reliably, and adaptably shared, and how an API management platform enables enterprises to ensure that they maintain control over their microservices as consumption grows.
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