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NZ Post delivers richer data insights with Elastic Stack
09 May 2025, 2:40 PMNZ Post partnered with Catalyst to optimise and future-proof their data processes with Elastic Stack.
Background
New Zealand Post (NZ Post) is the largest courier company in New Zealand, delivering millions of parcels a year. As a state-owned enterprise since 1987, NZ Post has grown as a staple service in Aotearoa New Zealand, for delivering most postal services in the country. NZ Post wanted to understand how they could better utilise the vast volume of data they process annually to create more efficiencies and growth while continuing the safe delivery of services to their customers long-term.
Opportunity
In the 24 financial year, NZ Post sent 84 million parcels and 187 million letters, and managing a large amount of data is critical to their operations. To help make sense of this information and make more data-driven decisions, NZ Post uses Elastic Stack, a software enabling them to ingest, query, and visualise data. NZ Post had implemented the system but lacked the resources to optimise Elastic Stack, which could better enable their decision making, processes, and future-proof its data processing.
NZ Post needed to partner with a technical specialist in Elastic Stack expertise to help them achieve their data storytelling goals and maximise the benefits Elastic Stack could provide them. Additionally, the solution needed to be easy to use by someone without a technical background.
NZ Post sought a partnership that would enable them:
- Build a strong foundation: Configuring Elastic for long-term resilience and performance.
- Adopt best practices: Managing data effectively with the right structures and processes.
- Streamline operations: Reduce manual and time-consuming, repetitive tasks and minimise human error.
- Make data accessible: Ensuring insights from data were clear and easy to understand, and creating actionable outputs.
- Create a scalable solution: NZ Post wanted the ability to scale as needed with market demands.
Since 2022, NZ Post has had a strong working relationship with Catalyst. With the Catalyst team having over a decade of experience with Elastic, it was a natural fit to partner for this project.
Solution
NZ Post initially built a proof of concept, testing ways to improve data processes as demand grew. When Catalyst joined the project, the two teams collaborated to implement a fully supported, long-term solution.
Catalyst worked with NZ Post to understand their data formats, what information they need from their data, and to identify their search workflows. From here, the Catalyst technical team:
- Rewrote the data processing pipelines for incoming data to extract and enrich relevant information. For example, putting the data into a visual perspective, utilising the map feature in Elastic.
- Restructured stored data to reduce system overhead, optimise resources, and improve query performance.
- Created responsive dashboards enabling NZ Post to explore their data and the opportunities within it, efficiently.
- Provided ongoing guidance and advice on how to maintain best practices and gain better quality results, faster.
Results
Since going live, NZ Post have been able to streamline the processes with their data. Brad Sloan, the acting General Manager of Cloud and Operations, shares that the project creates: "A nice link around small investments we are making which are having a huge impact on real-world scenarios."
An enhanced user experience
NZ Post has enhanced the overall experience with data using Elastic Stack:
- A secure and scalable foundation: The foundation of the project sets a new baseline for how new or modified Elastic Search Ingest pipelines can be deployed for future data sets.
- Best practices with data structure: NZ Post is aligned with Elastic best practices for storing and managing their data correctly.
- Fewer manual tasks: Queries can now be saved and easily reused, freeing up the team’s time to focus on other tasks.
- Data visualisation: Staff can easily visualise and scan data at a glance on customisable dashboards and responsive visualisations to explore their data. For instance, staff members can set up their commonly used searches and easily identify outliers in data.
- More user-friendly results: Technical data is presented in clear, easy-to-read formats and represented visually.
- A scalable solution: NZ Post can easily handle the scope of their data as it grows by increasing the size of Elastic Stack to parse and enrich the data. They also receive ongoing maintenance and support from Catalyst.
Looking ahead
Making sense of data through visualisation and reports can help you make faster, data-driven decisions. We’re proud to have supported NZ Post to optimise how they make sense of and manage their data, setting them up for the long term.
With over 10 years of experience in Elastic Stack and over 25 years improving infrastructure across sectors, our team can help you to optimise your tools and get the most out of your data. Contact us today for infrastructure support.
Services provided
- Solution design
- Information architecture
- Technical specialist with Elastic Stack
