The cross-border postal business processes increasingly depend on data provision and compliance. Current IT systems are built to report after the fact, e.g. monthly timeliness and data quality reports and monthly payment reports. Such reports provide insight on trends and key problems, but they do not proactively alert users of potential issues. As a result, once an issue is identified it is often too late to react, potentially impacting the flow of mail and exposing posts to financial penalties in terminal dues agreements.

How does it work?

Building on the IPC Message Exchange Platform, the IPC Proactive Monitoring System (PMS) receives all the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) from the GXS network and compares it with the data received from posts. The IPC Proactive Monitoring
System analyses the incoming data real-time to determine trends, compares the analysis against log files and immediately alerts the posts if any anomalies and violations against thresholds are detected. This allows for posts to remedy the situation before any negative impacts arise.

Alerts will be sent in four cases:

  • If no data has been received
  • If lower volumes of data have been received compared to expected data volumes
  • If the data appears to be missing the relevant timeliness measures
  • If the quality of the data is not ensured, for instance blank fields in any messages

IPC then informs its users through a real-time dashboard and alerts. Posts can also be alerted through API or e-mail.

Benefits

By using the IPC Proactive Monitoring System, posts are:

  • Avoiding financial impact of potential data issues
  • Ensuring preparedness for future required data flows, e.g. EU ICS2 (European Commission Import Control System version 2) and US Stop Act
  • Increasing customer satisfaction by providing track & trace data real-time and proactive notifications without interruptions
  • Constantly improving data provisioning and data quality 

More information

To find out more about this service, please contact [email protected].