Card payment upon parcel delivery (COD)

DPD, a subsidiary of the French operator DPD Group, leads the courier industry in Poland and already accounts for 30 per cent of this industry, which is worth PLN 5 bn per annum in Poland.

Seeking new possibilities to boost market share, the innovation leader decided to listen to what the clients needed and introduced to its service portfolio card payments with the courier – a service that had not thus far been offered by any courier company in Poland:
“As it appears from DPD Group’s analyses, and also from Gemius research, payments upon receipt are very popular in Poland. This online shopping settlement method is preferred by an astonishing 75 per cent of the survey respondents. Our couriers were the first ones on the Polish market to have been equipped with the terminals. We are introducing the cashless solution – convenient for the parcel recipient, safe for the courier and for the online store which settles the transaction with the buyer in a cashless manner. The decision to implement the card payment system is the answer to our clients’ expectations – for years they have been shaping the offer of online stores and courier firms”, says Rafał Nawłoka, President of the Board at DPD Polska.

As the provider of the largest part of the project, BlueSoft faced an ambitious task of deploying an integrated system for accepting and settling payments before the December parcel traffic peak. The timeframe of the project could not have been extended and the project acceptance criteria had been very rigorous. What added to the overall risk was that the project comprised modifying the COD payment settlement module, which had been a new and never previously developed area for BlueSoft team. A total of 4 providers participated in the project, it lasted merely 3 months and the Contractors had a pioneer business objective to meet.

In order to fulfill the objectives, BlueSoft set out to complete the task using the agile approach to IT projects. The analyses and development work were conducted in parallel in the context of the requirements. Such approach reduced “time to market” to the minimum. The analyst’s role in the project was not limited to simply working at the analysis stage – instead, analysts were actively involved throughout the project’s life cycle.

The incremental approach to creating the system meant starting the testing phase faster and increasing the tests’ iterations, thus guaranteeing the best quality of the deliverable. This way we also optimized the time needed for BlueSoft to integrate with the remaining providers.