Chapter 14. Deutsche Post AG Case Study

This chapter describes the introduction of a Service-Oriented Architecture at Deutsche Post. Deutsche Post belongs to Deutsche Post World Net, a multinational group with more than 275,000 employees, comprising also the brands DHL and Postbank. The SOA described in this chapter was set up for the MAIL Corporate division at Deutsche Post, a partner to three million business customers, providing services to 39 million households through 81,000 delivery staff, 13,000 retail outlets, 3,500 delivery bases and 140,000 letterboxes. Deutsche Post is Europe's leading letter mail service provider and the number one direct marketing company in the German market. Currently, the SOA is also rolled out at DHL, which counts 50 percent of the "Forbes 500" companies that have logistics requirements among its customer base. DHL has a global presence in 150 countries, a total of 430 terminals/warehouses and a total of 45,000 employees.

Deutsche Post's decision to introduce a Service-Oriented Architecture was based on several considerations. Deutsche Post's IT landscape grew significantly for the last years. Such a huge, distributed and complex infrastructure is not easy to maintain especially concerning the core business processes. In addition, the development of new applications became difficult. Numerous applications were so-called island solutions instead of holistic, business-driven solutions. Moreover, applications did not have clear functional boundaries, which led to considerable functional redundancy between applications and made modifications complex and resource intensive.

Finally, the maintenance of the IT architecture used up a considerable amount of the overall IT budget and offered hardly any access to core information about revenues, cost, and competitor information, which is crucial in today's dynamic business environment. This information was scattered over many components of the IT landscape and had to be consolidated via complex processes. The need for a consistent and centralized data storage became apparent.

Given this situation, Deutsche Post decided to introduce a business-driven SOA.^[1] The initial concept of this SOA was produced in 1999, and the actual implementation started in 2000. In addition to business services, a service infrastructure, the Service Backbone (SBB), was also realized. This backbone was launched in December 2001 and has since then been successfully used as the technical basis for Deutsche Post's SOA.

^[1] The SOA is called Business Domain Model (BDM) at Deutsche Post.

As we have indicated in Chapter 12, a great deal of an SOA's success depends on properly defined processes and comprehensive documentation. Deutsche Post therefore provided a set of three articles defining the foundation of their SOA (see [HBa04], [HBr03], [HS03]). This case study makes extensive use of this worthwhile documentation.

This chapter describes in some detail how the SOA has been implemented at Deutsche Post. In Section 14.1, the general scope of Deutsche Post's architecture is presented, both from a business and technical perspective. Section 14.2 then discusses the organizational structures and processes used to implement the SOA. The technological perspective is presented in detail in Section 14.3. Finally, Section 14.4 describes the lessons learned, the benefits achieved by Deutsche Post, and future perspectives.