CTT: Forging a competitive edge into the future with an integrated package of solutions in the cloud
Explore CTT’s journey with SAP
Postal service CTT has been connecting Portugal and the world for five centuries. With the RISE with SAP and SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management solutions, it has digitalized processes and automated billing systems, helping it stay agile, grasp opportunities, and safeguard this incredible legacy.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Government | Lisbon, Portugal | 12,200 employees |
traceability of billing processes.
of business processes standardized.
IT Corporate Director, CTT Correios de Portugal S.A.
Simplifying billing in an agile, future-ready enterprise
Few companies can claim a lineage as venerable as that of CTT Correios de Portugal S.A., which traces its roots back to 1520. As Portugal’s largest postal service provider, CTT operates more than 1,000 post offices across the country, serving a population of more than 10 million. The CTT group of companies, which includes Banco CTT, CTT Express, and Dott, provides postal, courier, e-commerce, and financial services worldwide.
Postal and courier services have changed dramatically in recent times, with people sending fewer letters and receiving more parcels. As the popularity of e-commerce has exploded, CTT has seen an 83% increase in annual parcel volumes since 2010, up to 18 million parcels a year. Meanwhile, competition from rival delivery-service providers is fierce, and CTT must adapt rapidly to new customer expectations such as same-day delivery and real-time tracking.
However, this flexibility was hindered by the group’s ERP landscape, which was heavily customized with more than 100 integrations to third-party systems and new features created using custom code. The resulting complexity made it difficult to quickly respond to business needs and embrace revenue opportunities. For example, it took 10 hours to create an invoice for each company code and 24 hours to complete the monthly billing cycle. Any corrections required considerable manual effort, and billing processes were so complex that they were run by IT rather than finance teams.
Pricing is already complicated in the parcel business, as a number of different variables must be considered, such as distance, weight, size, and special services. CTT knew complexity would only increase as it expands into banking and other nonparcel delivery businesses.
To simplify billing operations, eliminate revenue leakage, and succeed in an evolving marketplace, CTT needed to move its core business processes to a digital platform and automate billing workflows. As Nuno Carreira Silva, the company’s IT corporate director, explains, “New market trends demand significant transformation in the postal sector. Digital capabilities are required to develop the innovative new products and services that customers crave and, crucially, bring them to market quickly.”
IT Corporate Director, CTT Correios de Portugal S.A.
Smoothly integrating solutions for a single view of billing
CTT has a long-standing, trusted relationship with SAP, having used SAP solutions for more than 20 years. The company decided combining RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management would provide the scalability it needed to process complex billing data accurately.
Nuno Carreira Silva explains, “We believe SAP to be the leader in the ERP space, and migrating to RISE with SAP allowed us to leverage our existing investment. Of the billing systems we considered, only SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management met all our functional requirements. Integration with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition was another important deciding factor.”
The company understood that standard integration between SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management would help increase efficiency in a new landscape based on automated digital workflows.
Moreover, integrating SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management with the existing SAP Convergent Mediation solution by DigitalRoute would consolidate billing information from different business areas in a single overview, increasing transparency and accelerating processing. The new accounting and invoicing landscape would also enable additional billing flexibility by helping CTT capture logistical events on a granular level and monetize them in different ways.
To minimize the risk of business disruption, the group took a phased approach, first implementing the RISE with SAP offering for the parcels business and Banco CTT before moving on to other companies. Working with SAP, it consolidated multiple legacy systems to RISE with SAP, covering core business processes and giving users across the group an intuitive interface and user-friendly workflows based on the SAP Fiori user experience.
IT Corporate Director, CTT Correios de Portugal S.A.
Adapting nimbly to meet evolving customer and market needs
Thanks to RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management, core business processes at CTT are connected, digital, and powered by automated workflows, cutting complexity and increasing efficiency. CTT can respond more rapidly to new business requirements and revenue opportunities, quickly introducing innovative offerings to offset falling traditional-mail volumes.
For example, the company’s new express-pack service, which uses the allowances feature in SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management, lets customers pay for package shipments as a prepaid service. In addition, by integrating the SAP Extended Warehouse Management application and SAP Fiori apps, the company has designed a new and efficient mobile process that Nuno Carreira Silva says will help it grow as a third-party logistics provider. The company can automatically include logistics services in an invoice by smoothly collecting data from warehouse processes and transforming it into billable items.
With a standard billing system, CTT has established a single source of truth and increased transparency. It has the flexibility to support different pricing models, such as recurring, one-time, and consumption-based fees. The billing team, which now runs 100% of billing processes instead of IT, can bill accurately using robust charging and billing data and comprehensively trace billing processes from one source. And automated and accelerated business processes have empowered employees to work more productively and accurately, creating invoices in just two hours and slashing a day from the monthly financial closing process.
What’s more, the company has been able to drastically increase the number of daily events in SAP Convergent Mediation by DigitalRoute to 800,000, allowing it to correctly bill customers during peak seasons such as the holiday period while minimizing revenue leakage.
On the IT operational side, SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition serves as the master data repository for third-party systems, which are integrated using APIs rather than traditional point-to-point connections. This has halved the number of interfaces, simplifying the system landscape, reducing total cost of ownership, and cutting the lead time for new implementations. CTT no longer depends on legacy custom code to develop and implement new functionality. And in terms of IT maintenance, Nuno Carreira Silva says, “We rely on SAP to keep our SAP software landscape up and running. We don’t need to check whether the problem is in the CPU or our system parameters: Now, it’s always a question for SAP.”
Deploying intelligent technology in the next chapter of its history
Looking ahead, CTT plans to continue refining its business processes and augmenting its SAP solutions to meet changing business needs. The company’s main goal is to maintain the scalability of the new landscape and continue to support the business with standard functionality. One key milestone is migrating remaining on-premise IT systems to RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition.
The company is also collaborating with SAP on ways to use SAP Business Technology Platform to augment its new landscape. Current projects involve investigating how it can harness the power of AI in SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management using the Joule copilot. As Nuno Carreira Silva says, “To be able to chat with Joule on charged and billable items will be a dream come true.”
CTT has thrived for half a millennium by adapting to customers’ needs and changing market expectations. With an integrated IT environment based on SAP solutions, the company is set to deftly meet whatever challenges arise in the next 500 years.