PEP: Connecting South Africa with quick and easy parcel delivery on PAXI, built with Google Cloud
About PEP
With more than 2,600 stores across Southern Africa, PEP is a household name, selling everyday items, such as clothing, footwear, homeware, and cellphones, at affordable prices. Capitalizing on its large store network, PEP has developed PAXI, a parcel delivery service that enables fast and reliable C2C, B2C, and C2B deliveries.
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Contact usPEP transitioned its parcel service PAXI from on-premises to a cloud-native solution on Google Cloud, boosting uptime, slashing costs, and paving the way for AI-enhanced features.
Google Cloud results
- Reduces downtime to near zero in first year, enhancing PAXI's reliability thanks to autoscaling on Cloud Run
- Enables rapid solutions and business continuity, saving $155,000 in revenue after the Durban flooding of 2022
- Increases deployments from quarterly to up to three times a week, accelerating the release of new features
- Enables real-time data visualization, making business teams more agile and independent from IT
Handles 1.6 million API requests every day
Wherever you are in South Africa, you're always near a PEP store. PEP's stores are stocked with all kinds of items, such as clothing, footwear, homeware, and cellphones, making it a one-stop destination for diverse shopping needs. That's why PEP, which is part of holding group Pepkor, stands as the biggest single-brand retailer in all of Africa.
With around 2,600 stores across Southern Africa, PEP stores outnumber even the country's post offices. This reach is what makes PEP more than a retailer: it's an everyday touchpoint for people and communities. To further connect these communities, PEP launched PAXI, a parcel service that turns local stores into easy-access hubs for parcel delivery and collection.
Going from monolith to cloud-native with Google Cloud
Built and maintained by Pepkor IT, the go-to IT provider for Pepkor's retail solutions, PAXI marks a game-changing move for the company, pioneering a shift to cloud-native applications. "We originally built PAXI on-premises as a monolith, but it quickly outgrew its capacity, causing reliability issues," explains Francois Hayward, IT Executive of Customer & Digital Solutions at Pepkor IT. "We just couldn't afford regular downtimes and needed a more agile, stable, and scalable infrastructure, which brought us to Google Cloud."
Because Hayward and his team had already been using Google Workspace for digital collaboration, they were keen to explore what else Google Cloud has to offer. Beyond solving immediate infrastructure challenges, they were looking to harness the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
"We originally built PAXI on-premises as a monolith, but it quickly outgrew its capacity, causing reliability issues. We just couldn't afford regular downtimes and needed a more agile, stable, and scalable infrastructure, which brought us to Google Cloud."
—Francois Hayward, IT Executive of Customer & Digital Solutions, Pepkor IT"We've built a strong expertise around Google Cloud, so it's our natural first choice for all cloud-based software development moving forward," says Hayward. "And as a data-centric retailer, we're obviously keen to embrace AI and ML solutions, and we see Google Cloud leading the way there in the future."
Rebuilding PAXI for cloud-native efficiency
Rather than lift-and-shift its monolith into the cloud, the Pepkor IT team decided to rebuild it as a cloud-native solution, using best-fit technologies from Google Cloud for each feature and process. With guidance from the Google Cloud team, they grouped common functionalities together and consolidated them into microservices connected by APIs. For PAXI customers, the switch was completely seamless because traffic was shifted gradually from the old system to the new.
Today, the microservices-based PAXI app is deployed in Cloud Run, which automatically scales with the number of incoming requests. The team uses API Gateway to manage APIs and integrate PAXI into stores, apps, and third-party systems, and Security Command Center to monitor everything and discover potential threats. In addition, PAXI uses Dialogflow to power a WhatsApp chatbot for customer self-service and parcel tracking.
Boosting the bottom line with faster parcel processing
The immediate benefit of PAXI's cloud transformation is stability. While self-hosted APIs used to crash multiple times per week due to spikes in demand, the autoscaling capabilities of Cloud Run have made regular outages a thing of the past. "In the past, we had incidents where our services were down an entire day," says Hayward. "Besides disappointed customers, this leads to lots of problems down the line, such as lost parcels or increased demand on our call centers. Thanks to autoscaling on Cloud Run, PAXI has suffered almost zero outages over the past year."
But PAXI isn't just more reliable, it also works more efficiently. "Tools like Cloud Run, API Gateway, and AutoML have had a remarkable effect on our development team's performance," says Maryna van Eeden, Product Manager, PAXI. "Google Cloud has enhanced our efficiency and positioned us favorably for future growth and resilience."
"Tools like Cloud Run, API Gateway, and AutoML have had a remarkable effect on our development team's performance. Google Cloud has enhanced our efficiency and positioned us favorably for future growth and resilience."
—Maryna van Eeden, Product Manager, PAXIPAXI's ability to work at speed was put to the test in April 2022 when a catastrophic flood hit the city of Durban. "Google Cloud enabled us to build a solution in two days and allow business to continue as usual. Otherwise, we were looking at losing three months' income from one of our streams," explains Hayward. "That alone saved us nearly 3 million South African rands (around $155,000)."
Delivering self-service simplicity
In the past, PAXI's deployment process was lengthy and fraught with challenges. The company aimed to ship features to production every two weeks, but the monolithic architecture meant that the testing periods often took longer than the actual development of a feature. About two-thirds of deployments needed rollbacks and multiple attempts, rendering the team's agile approach practically unfeasible.
Today, Hayward and his team can deploy updates and new features whenever they're ready. "Because Google Cloud abstracts away the complexity, our developers can focus on code," says Hayward. "This allows small teams of developers to deploy on their own. As a result, deployments that used to take hours have gone down to minutes with almost no operational downtime. Plus, we had only one rollback over the past year, even as deployments increased from once per quarter to as high as three times per week."
For PAXI's customers, faster deployments mean swifter access to enhanced features and improved service quality. "Sometimes, I hand over new requirements on Tuesday for a release on Friday," says van Eeden. "Things move incredibly fast now, which makes a big difference in our world. The sooner we can release a new feature, the sooner we can pass on new benefits to our customers and make returns on our investment."
Over the past months, the team has been steadily optimizing PAXI's customer portal, adding new self-service features to make the delivery process even simpler. For example, customers can now pre-register parcels at home to make the drop-off even quicker, and receive more detailed tracking information. "We used to be afraid to release new features and minimum viable products as soon as they were ready, making us slow to incorporate customer feedback," says Hayward. "Since moving to Google Cloud, we know that we can quickly fix and adapt things, which makes us much more responsive to customer needs."
Empowering business decisions with real-time data visualization
PAXI's commitment to self-service doesn't just extend to its customers. Business teams, for example, used to rely on IT to produce static reports, often needing to wait until the next day to analyze the previous day's data. Using BigQuery as its cloud data warehouse and Looker Studio to visualize the data in live dashboards, they can gain near real-time insights into customer needs and behavior - and they can do it all by themselves.
"Since moving to Google Cloud, our business teams have become more independent and can make data-driven decisions faster, without relying on IT for every minor change or update," says Hayward. "By integrating our cloud-enabled self-service capabilities into business processes, we're becoming more agile and flexible as a company."
Evolving parcel delivery with the transformative power of AI
With a daily average of more than 1.65 million API requests, PAXI generates heaps of data. Now that this data is accessible in the cloud, the team is eager to harness the power of artificial intelligence to further optimize and innovate their services. They've already begun this journey, experimenting with AutoML to better predict delivery times and experimenting with Vision AI to create a competitive shopping tool, allowing users to snap a picture of an item and find a similar product on the PEP store's online site.
"We're sitting on vast amounts of data, and if we use it to its full potential we can build a truly customer-centric delivery platform," says Hayward. "AI solutions can help us optimize our services and spot new opportunities with the data we have, and that's where the support and expertise of Google Cloud will become crucial in the future."
"There's still so much untapped potential for PAXI. We're discovering new opportunities almost every month, and Google Cloud enables us to capitalize on them and evolve our PAXI services without compromising on stability or security. Add the potential of AI, and our journey with Google Cloud is only getting started."
—Francois Hayward, IT Executive of Customer & Digital Solutions, Pepkor ITAs the digital landscape shifts and consumer behavior evolves, PAXI is constantly on the lookout for new business opportunities and ways to better serve existing customers. While customer-to-customer deliveries make up most of PAXI's business today, small and medium-sized ecommerce providers are increasingly electing PAXI as their logistics provider of choice, opening up new avenues for growth.
"There's still so much untapped potential for PAXI," says Hayward. "We're discovering new opportunities almost every month, and Google Cloud enables us to capitalize on them and evolve our PAXI services without compromising on stability or security. Add the potential of AI, and our journey with Google Cloud is only getting started."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About PEP
With more than 2,600 stores across Southern Africa, PEP is a household name, selling everyday items, such as clothing, footwear, homeware, and cellphones, at affordable prices. Capitalizing on its large store network, PEP has developed PAXI, a parcel delivery service that enables fast and reliable C2C, B2C, and C2B deliveries.