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When you're getting ready to ship that Christmas present to a relative across the country you might go to Purolator's Web site and punch in two postal codes – yours and Uncle Bob's, say – to get a shipping estimate and a list of available add-on services.

The tool makes sending a package a simple process, but its development was part of a larger project to transform the business of Canada's largest courier company. Mississauga, Ont.-based Purolator Courier Ltd.

Purolator is witnessing the dramatic impact of its decision to shed its legacy IT systems in favour of new applications and a trimmer infrastructure that allows the courier company to offer more services and reach out to more customers. One key piece to that puzzle was Microsoft's BizTalk Server 2006 R2.

The scope of the project was pretty big. An IT department overhaul, saw 40 applications reduced down to just three. The decade-old systems that were replaced had become staggering monstrosities of ad-hoc code – the billing system alone had thousands of Cobol modules, says Jim McDade, CIO of Purolator. Such archaic systems weren't really meeting changing customer needs.

"Customers wanted new products and services," he says. "We [sought to] harmonize what they wanted [multiple] points of contact."

The courier moves a whopping 1.1 million packages a day and interacts with over 20,000 customers through various shipping channels. That includes the Web site, electronic data interchange (EDI) link-ups with businesses, desktop-based software, and face-to-face transactions.

Since going live with its online service in Sept. 2007, Purolator has boosted its volume by 20 per cent per day, says Laura Dobson, architectural advisor at Innovapost. The Mississauga-based company services the IT needs of both Purolator and Canada Post.

Dobson credits BizTalk, in part, for making her job easier.

"With this technology we were able to take a huge leap," she says. "By the time we went live, we had reduced the risk so we weren't talking about technology [anymore]. It was really looking at the online channel and how to move more volume than we did before."

Microsoft's integration server is a product that aims to help companies needing to exchange data between many different parties. This was the case with Purolator with its multiple sales channels that live both in the consumer space and business space. BizTalk acts as a compatibility layer that works out all of the differences between the way Purolator's systems understand data, and the way its customers' systems understand data.

A good metaphor for it is that of an interpreter brokering a dialogue between delegates all speaking different languages, says Chris Brakel, product manager for eBusiness at Microsoft Canada Co.

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