With the implementation of its first data-driven #strategy, the #UPU has recognized the importance of #ecommerce in today’s growing #digitaleconomy and is adapting the #global #postal network to facilitate individual #commercial item #delivery. As a result, postal operators will not only become key ecommerce #stakeholders, their extensive delivery networks and multi-dimensional service portfolios will also encourage this development. The UPU’s Integrated Product Plan ensures that the global postal network is agile and innovative, with UPU products and services encouraging #technologicalprogress and offering a compelling alternative to onshore companies riding the global value chain.

Since 2012, the UPU has addressed the #challenges of #data sharing in postal supply chains and reaped the benefits this brings. The result has been to establish a global postal network of decentralised information exchange platforms and peer-to-peer solutions, within which postal operators, authorities, and increasingly the wider postal sector stakeholders can implement their own system functionality. Following its data-driven strategy, the UPU aims to interconnect, harmonise, and expand the services offered within this existing network landscape, rather than to develop a new centralized solution with its own specific functionalities.

Connecting the national postal networks with the wider postal sector stakeholders upstream and downstream of these networks is accomplished by means of common protocols for supporting #data sharing services. Using the party identifiers which are already available, stakeholders need only register once with a national network and use this single point of connection to access or provide their services and products globally – similar to internet access.

The universal character of the data-driven postal infrastructure increases the market share of individual network providers, while individual organizations, enterprises, and authorities can all select a solution of choice, and innovative sector #stakeholders can develop new functionalities such as dynamic delivery location options, user-independent pick-up, and drop-off #solutions, and #innovative applications on smart devices including a variety of payment and social services.

Platform interoperability is based on the protocols supporting platform services. Each national postal network may have its own #governance model, while trust, identity, and behavioral rules are specified by UPU’s global postal #model.

#update #development #infrastructure #network #harmonization #decentralization #solution #technology #europe #global #improvement #interconnectedness