Fancy building a replacement for Post Office's disastrous Horizon system? The Post Office, the UK government-owned retail organization for post and banking, has kicked off procurement to help build the system replacing Horizon, the disastrous EPOS and back office system at the heart of one of the country's greatest miscarriages of justice. The Horizon system, introduced in 1999, was built by ICL …
How many EPOS systems does the country need?
Why can't the PO ask ASDA or Tesco (or someone else in retail) for help building one?
I'm fairly sure most retailers will have got the bugs out of their own systems by now.
On another tack, what exactly does the Post Office do that couldn't be done better by the PO sub-postmasters themselves, perhaps arranged into a system like Nisa.
I'm sure there are various big cheeses at POL who would argue that they couldn't POSSIBLY use an off-the-shelf EPOS system, and the idea of trusting SPMs to run it themselves would make them choke on their Chivas Regal.
No no no, it has to be a big centralised bespoke system, ideally one where we can fiddle the books remotely and fit people up for Fraud if we don't like them but can't fire them..
With a bit of luck though, some of those Cheeses will be rooted out by the Inquiry and sent to jail. One can only hope.
Way back in early 2000s I was working for a POS software house. The Post Office sent us some hardware asking if we could run our POS on their <ancient> hardware. It couldn't do - our software was too resource hungry so we were out, but thinking if they were willing to upgrade their hardware, at least from mid-2000s the Horizon would be out and hundreds, if not thousands of people wouldn't have suffered injustice like this.
2966 is hardly 'ancient' ! Try a 1904S ?
Also a bit tricky to fit a 2966 OCP/SAC/SMAC and some FDS200's in the post office itself.
Perhaps awkward to explain the power usage too ...
The OPER is fine for the job - they took far more 'handling' than any sub-postmaster could provide :-)
One thing which I discovered looking through some of the more technical accounts was that the counters provide services for a number of customers. ASDA PoS will not simultaneously be handling sales for Tesco and Morrisons as well as their own.
A slightly more comparable situation can arise with a filling station operating a supermarket branded convenience store: a few days ago I bought petrol at a BP filling station with a Morrisons Local (or whatever they call it) convenience store attached which could handle BP customer cards but not Morrisons'.
The COTS PoS system is too limited when it's asked to stray outside supporting one business at atime. The alternative, of course, is that the PO reorganises the way it does business to avoid all that. Maybe miracles are possible.
> ASDA PoS will not simultaneously be handling sales for Tesco and Morrisons as well as their own.
Suggest you visit Asda’s, Aldi et al.
Aldi are a concessionary for the National Lottery, to buy a ticket, just scan the bar code and the till will generate a lottery ticket as well as a sales receipt.
Asda etc. whilst being a consessionary for National Lottery, also enable you to top up mobile phones, buy iStore, Amazon etc. vouchers
Just because it goes through a single till doesn’t mean it is handled the same way in the backend and accounts.
EPOS systems are nowadays just a front end into the entire IT system of a retail business. So systems for stock control, transport logistics, business analysis of sales, etc are all completely integrated with the instant data they get from the EPOS. These are how businesses differentiate themselves and compete with each other, so to have one system only would appear to be a cost saving, but would eliminate competition and innovation and make the retail sector into a cosy cartel.
Furthermore, the systems used in Asda for monitoring sales and reordering stock are going to be very different from the integration required at the post office for renewing passports, currency exchange, parcel tracking, etc. The only thing they really have in common is the fact that you have to hand money over at the till for whatever it is you're doing.
> Furthermore, the systems used in Asda for monitoring sales and reordering stock are going to be very different from the integration required at the post office for renewing passports, currency exchange, parcel tracking, etc
They are just back end integrations driven by the barcode. However, some do require front end integrations, which can be achieve in the same way web browsers run applets for passports, phone credits etc. with the applet selection also being driven by the barcode…
Most of the things that the Post Office sells are things that aren't in stock - if I take a parcel to the post office and ask them to deliver it some place, they work out how much it will cost, and print a postage label for that amount. Then they do things like check passport applications, hand out payments for benefits & pensions, provide limited branch banking services for some banks and so on.
This is very different to what Tesco & Asda do.
It should be noted that Asda have their own problems with de-merging their computer system from Walmart's.
> POL and Royal Mail are different organizations.
I seem to remember the in Post Office systems are operated through Post Office Counters Ltd.
I suspect this permits greater clarity over transactions and avoids monies destined for say Royal Mail appearing on and thus distorting Post Office Ltd accounts.
Tesco replaced their in-store IT several months ago and it is a crock from the shopper's point of view. The 'smart-shop' barcode readers are now super-slow as the product lookup process when you scan the barcode has gone from essentially instant to several seconds, and it repeats also when you scan for more than one item. Heaven knows where they got the design team from.
The reality is not far off...
"The Telegraph has seen 40 instances of customers claiming that stamps - both old and new - they bought from Post Offices or the Royal Mail website were flagged as invalid."
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/royal-mail-post-office-daily-telegraph-post-offices-b1149108.html
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/03/royal-mail-stamp-chaos-post-office-barcodes/
BBC is saying "China is wot dun it" making counterfeit stamps.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68786782
Now what's interesting to me is the 2 stamps labelled genuine & fake in this article are visually identical, except for the different barcodes. Why aren't the Chinese (or whoever) copying the barcodes? Why do they do such a picture-perfect effort on the rest, only to obviously fail at that?
(American stamps don't have barcodes, so I don't know how they work...)
Iain Duncan Smith is the one blaming China, but he doesn't seem to have any evidence.
Personally, I think this is the second Horizon scandal.
What's more probable:
1) Someone is printing large numbers of stamps with an invalid QR code and sneaking them into the supply chain completely unnoticed.
2) The Horizon system is not registering some stamp sales and invalidating blocks of genuine stamps.
Not got a packet of stamps to hand, but from that picture it looks like the stamps might have individual serial numbers, so what’s happened is someone forgot to scan the packet/sheet to change its status to released for sale/use.
OR… the behind the scenes issuing/sales system didn’t correctly record the sale/issuing of the stamps… and if that system is … Horizon, this would be par for the course…
When I complained to Tesco about the crappy new system they said 'Take it up with the store manager'. When I asked if my local store manager was responsible for Tesco's software development they were not amused. The system is no better now than when it went live so I assume it's a fundamental design error rather than tweaking some parameters to improve the response.
"Why can't the PO ask ASDA or Tesco (or someone else in retail) for help building one?"
It's it strange (OK, it's not) that there are rarely or never major issues with such systems in the commercial world? Such systems are critical to the running of big businesses, and they clearly know what they are doing when procuring them.
What a contrast to major government IT projects, where a fuck up (at vast expense) is often the most likely outcome...
In a business, with enough delay, the hierarchy will produce a boss who is above everyone and says: fucking get this shit done right now or you’re done…
In the public sector, there is no hierarchy, just horizontal divisions who collaborate, so it’s messy as fuck and you can’t bang people’s heads together
"Undoubtedly the advice given will be "Cloud". If that's taken up we can expect to see all POs in the country being out of operation at the same time fairly regularly."
EXACTLY !!
I would imagine that some numpty on the Post Office Board of Directors, has spouted the word "cloud" and made damn sure that this was part of whatever they use to replace Horizon.
But having queued in many UK post offices to send a few small items out at around 4:30pm, only to end up standing behind one person who wanted to buy foreign exchange AND renew their passport AND send some Signed For letters AND pay their energy supplier AND take out some cash, it is going to be very tough for ANY IT system to handle all these types of transactions, via which ever BRAND NEW touch screen hardware every Post Office is going to need (as the Horizon hardware is no doubt "unsuitable") and for ALL these IT systems (in over 11,500 branches, each of which might have two, three even four active terminals at any one time) to be needing to transact data to/from the Cloud at the same time?
I can see some HUGE issues arising, both in development, testing and even once commissioned. And 75 million (probably based on some back of fag packet calculation) simply won't be enough to give POL the bespoke system they want.
They'd be much better off buying in the software from a similar operation in Sweden, Denmark, Germany or some other region ..and just getting the screen prompts/displays translated into English.
"(in over 11,500 branches, each of which might have two, three even four active terminals at any one time)"
My local post office has 7 counter positions in the main section, plus the 4 self service units, plus an extra counter position by the door. And I have seen all of the counters open at once, so not 3 even 4 active terminals, but 8 + self service.
> (in over 11,500 branches, each of which might have two, three even four active terminals at any one time)
Based on a own datacentre system I designed and installed in circa 2004 that’s:
A top end Z-Series fronted by 4 mid-range “Unix”(*) boxes, double it for failover and add a third as a spare/tertiary failover configuration in a different data centre.
Although with the number of back end integrations required, I would probably replace/supplement that Z-Series with a two-tier configuration of high-end Unix servers, making it easier to add/remove bespoke servers for specific product/service lines.
Obviously the in-branch server will also be a reasonable “Unix”(*) box, so most of the traffic will be transactions rather than terminal sessions.
Alternatively, you could go the web server approach, which would require a larger server infrastructure. in which case the in-branch server is minimised, but has the limitation that a loss of service would mean the counter closing rather than not being able to process particular services.
I suspect cloud providers will push this load on their rebranded version of IBM cloud.
The issues in development and testing is that, at this scale, is you don’t use the apps and dev tools out-of-the-box to build the production system, so many of the developers will have had no experience of this style of development.
I remember from that project the main DB application provider saying stuff could be done overnight, until we confirmed they had only used their toolset on DBs up to circa 400GB; we were going to be using them on a 4TB DB…
(*) By Unix I mean a Unix/Linux box actually designed to be a server to support high levels of I/O, rather than a beefed up PC running Windows/Linux.
"I remember from that project the main DB application provider saying stuff could be done overnight, until we confirmed they had only used their toolset on DBs up to circa 400GB; we were going to be using them on a 4TB DB…"
Failure to test at scale is a very common problem from the suppliers, even when offered the opportunity to do so on the test rig before deployment
"I would imagine that some numpty on the Post Office Board of Directors, has spouted the word "cloud" and made damn sure that this was part of whatever they use to replace Horizon."
The other in-vogue bullshit term which is likely to have been used is 'digital transformation' (i.s. sticking your data on somebody else's computers). 'Blockchain' seems to have fallen from favour in the bullshit lexicon of late, but 'AI' could well make an appearance.
I'm surprised to read that the tenders must be submitted by the start of May.
I honestly expected that they'd just extend the whole process indefinitely until the inquiry is finished, then spew out some guff about "valuing the relationship" and "wanting to capitalise on existing working knowledge" and hire Fujitsu for it.
That's the kind of spineless, venal thing I've come to expect from the management at the Post Office.
So I am quite surprised that this appears to be a genuine attempt to break away from the existing contract.
Unless, of course, Fujitsu already knew about this and therefore regard it as as exempt from their ban on tendering as it falls under ongoing projects.
Or the Post Office management decide that the bids are all unsuitable and go for another round... then another... then another... until they get what they want.
Still, there's plenty of time for that to happen yet. I won't believe it until contracts are signed...
"That's the kind of spineless, venal thing I've come to expect from the management at the Post Office."
As is the NDA. You'd have thought, after what had happened, they'd have wanted to be very open and transparent about the new system and, in particular, it's reliability. This "trust us" shit won't work, they burned that bridge in spectacular style.
"I honestly expected that they'd just extend the whole process indefinitely until the inquiry is finished"
I think they're targeting "heat death of the Universe" as the finish of the inquiry. They may not have that many new documents to discover but padding things out with discovering previously discovered document has helped thm in the past.
Undoubtedly, the Fuji-mob will throw their toys out of the pram, as they did around 2015 when an IBM-led team, (commissioned at the request of the PO), proposed a replacement system. IBM & others had spent a lot of time & money on the new design/proposal. IBM was so upset by the PO's caving in to theFuji reaction, that it is alleged that litigation was threatened and serious money was handed over.
If another team is looking as if it could take this "crock" over, and either repair or replace it, no doubt Fuji will arrange for the Japanese Ambasador or the CEO of Fuji to call into No 10 and point out how such a move would be greeted with distress by other Japanese companies wishing to invest in UK, such as Nissan. It's what they did before & I bet they'll do it again.
It's worth remembering that the IBM bid for the original system ranked technically better than ICL's (later Fuji's) but IBM lost because of its relucatnce to accept an open-ended obligation to accept any and all losses due to fraud on the benefits payments, that were, at that time, dispensed by the PO. Reluctantly, IBM added a large chunk of money to its bid so as to to ensure that it probbaly wouldn't win but if it did, there would be enough of a buffer to cover the ridiculous fraud risk. At that time, the Benefits Agency was in the driving seat and were obsessed with benefits fraud. Ironically, they soon dropped out and moved to payments via the banks, which is what they always wanted to do. This change meant that exposure of having to cover fraud risk was written out of the contract, much to ICL's relief, no doubt.
The papers revealed by the Inquiry show all this to be true, including the pressure put by the Japanese on HMG, plus the relative strengths of IBM's original proposal.. Also, I know, because, I was there.
"no doubt Fuji will arrange for the Japanese Ambasador or the CEO of Fuji to call into No 10"
Not anymore, thankfully. Fujitsu's name is Mud in Japan at the moment thanks to a bunch of similar but unrelated scandals there. Japanese citizens are only peripherally aware Fuji is involved in a major software scandal elsewhere in the world
I have no experience at all of large-scale, secure, traceable EPOS systems, so I'm a perfect top-level contractor.
I'll sub it out to someone I've never met, let it be developed for a few decades, and watch the money pour into my account. Then I'll move to my tax haven abroad.
Job done.
Nail on head, Roland6, but I actually was a member for a while. I joined after the brexit result with the sole purpose of voting against the fluffy-headed lying permabonking oaf as party leader if the opportunity arose. Call it tactical party membership.
Sadly I was outvoted by the blue rinse crowd, so I let it lapse.
Last time a big HMRC contract was out for tender, none of the big outfits bothered pointing out the contract would go to the incumbent and they were not going to waste money tendering.
HMRC had to pay their costs to tender.
Which made me consider setting up a company that only existed to provide tenders at someone elses cost.
The £37 billion spunked on test'n'trace shows how unambitious I was.
THE platform of choice, natch. After giving his backing to Birmingham Council's migration I'm sure he'd be only too happy to suggest they'd be a perfect fit for this project too. £75m should just about cover project scoping and the basic-requirements doc.
Relax: I'm joking. I think ;)
"How did we even arrive to be in such situation..."
Easy answer: The dumb, poorly educated voters were led to believe that a specific party and ALL their electoral candidates were "fit for purpose", had multiple skill sets and were going to govern fairly and honestly and to ensure the vast green brightly lit uplands would be safe in their hands.
The resulting so-called career politicians, who had NO idea about business, or any real-world knowledge of procedures, were put in charge of government depts and they had no idea of what to do, except to make crap speeches, re-iterating the same verbage their party leaders were spouting, and knowing full well that it was just smoke screens and mirrors and with a huge majority in the House of parliament, they could get away with anything. And by giving knighthoods and other gongs to their media savvy mates and awarding huge contracts for Covid PPE, they knew that they were all on a gravy train that would continue for as long as no one found out that they were useless.
But then Truss came along and proved to everyone, that they had no clue about anything and the rot set in...and even Sunak is lying through his back teeth, claiming that everything is going well, inflation is coming down, NHS waiting times are reducing (but still longer than before Sunak became the unelected PM) and his family are doing very well, thanks to that nice contract that was awarded to BP.
And by the way, his new mega-expensive house extension in his Richmond constituency, will be finished soon, as he will then have lots of time to enjoy it, once he is kicked out of office.
"Fujitsu has agreed not to tender for UK public sector work until the end of the inquiry, while the government has promised to accelerate compensation."
Worth a read of
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366577734/Fujitsu-staff-instructed-how-to-bid-for-government-contracts-during-self-imposed-ban
Seymour Cray, do you know my name?
Ah, don't say you don't
Please say you do, ah ah
(Then again, what does Morrissey know anyway? He hasn't had a major hit since those Bob the Builder singles over twenty years ago...)
That's no longer relevant as neither of the Kray twins have resided in Broadmoor for over twenty years.
Both now live in a stylish underground residence in Chingford Mount Cemetery.
Then again, perhaps "live" isn't the right word.
(Do they have the Internet in the afterlife, and does it require IP over Ouija?)
"Both now live in a stylish underground residence in Chingford Mount Cemetery."
Not far from my grandfather's grave, as well as the unmarked grave of his first wife and daughter. (I know the general location of the latter as a section of the cemetery was specifically for victims of the blitz). Pretty sure my grandfather would have had a choice word or two to say about sharing a cemetery with the three Kray brothers, as well as the way some people admire those vicious sods.
It's the whole back end.
Except, somewhat, for the links to the backend financial system, one supermarket's EPOS system could and has been used by another with minimal customisation. They all run on the same product barcode scanning system.
Post Office is different. Aside from, say, stamps there's no barcode to scan and the calculations for a single transaction can be complicated.
That’s why they couldn't/can't just modify an off-the-shelf retail EPOS system.
I've never worked in retail but isn't that the easy part? Sure the transactions are different - and there are lots of unique "service"-type transactions, which would have to be Java apps running in the till (walking the user through checking an International Driving Permit application, for example).
But the hard part, the part which needs to be secure, robust, reliable, unable to lose, corrupt or duplicate a transaction, never able to modify a transaction under any circumstances, etc. is presumably the same as other retail businesses. And so are tools like daily till reconciliations, stockcheck reconciliations, recording and tracking "shrinkage", generating operational and management reports, auditing, detecting fraud, etc.
Technically it's not that hard.
They got spotting missing transactions sort of right with seqental unique transaction numbers.
What they apparently didn't do was append CRCs/hash values to transactions for error/tamper checking.
Nor did they check for duplicate transactions.
And that's only when the transaction is written - the piece of offal that was Horizon couldn't be trusted to calculate it right in the first place.
> That’s why they couldn't/can't just modify an off-the-shelf retail EPOS system.
Current generation EPOS systems are obviously a lot more limited than the systems I used and greatly modified/enhanced circa 20 years back through the use of EAI tools…
There's no barcode on loose fruit and veg, and when I get a custom pizza from the counter the person who assembled it prints off an on-demand barcode.
When I go to the petrol station and buy some diesel, car wash, lottery tickets, book of stamps, a bottle of milk, chocolate biscuits and swipe my supermarket loyalty card, each of those items has a different supplier and/or VAT rate, some affect stock and some do not.
The only genuinely unique requirement for a Post Office EPOS is the logo. It really should be off-the-shelf.
Now, I wonder, was that part of ICL once called DataSkil? I rather suspect it was.
It was once referred to, by any other programmer ICL employees, as "RentaBerk" due to the extremely high quality of the code that emanated from it!
I have my suspicion that the departmental heads, in order to post high profitability for that division, needed a mechanism to boost their 'effectiveness'.
"Where, oh where, can we make some extra cash on the side in order to show how wonderful we are? Oh Yes! I have an idea."
But then, of course, it's just my imagination, nothing to do with the fact that I once worked for them.
I wonder if it's based on the back door I once created in some PLAN code I wrote back in the sixties. Now there's a thought.
Uk government: New Fujitsu contract for software for nuclear power stations! https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/fury-as-fujitsu-awarded-government-contract-despite-post-office-scandal/
"Whilst Post Office is responsible for overall programme management, strategy and architecture it has a requirement to engage with third parties to help create the necessary solution," the notice said.
Which is why it will fail, because software creation is in large part: programme management, strategy and architecture. Only someone who mistakes a knowledge gaining exercise like software creation for manufacturing would think of using nineteenth century Taylorism to manage it, i.e. "We've come up with the plan, we just need someone to bolt it all together".
New flash: No software plan survives contact with the enemy. Software programming is not the twenty first century equivalent of brick laying.
Obviously no lessons have been learnt.
We all know the PO Horizon system registered spurious debits, yes. We know about the spurious debits that were known about, but we don't know about the spurious debits that we don't know about. What we don't know is how many spurious debits were just paid-off, maybe because they were too small to recognise as anomalous, or to bother with, or because of the implications of reporting such a variation.
My point is: there could be a great deal more spurious debits than those known about, and all of this would likely add up to a great deal of money. So how come this anomaly was not detected, if only because with all these unfounded debits, Horizon's accounts would not balance?
If the Horizon system was so fatally flawed as to create thousands of spurious debits, could it not also have been simultaneously creating thousands of spurious credits. And would it not be greatly more probable that such spurious credits would be more likely to go unreported and/or unnoticed.
PLUS, we do not know exactly how or why this system created these thousands of spurious debits. What we do know is that, despite the Post Office's denials, there was back-end access to the branch accounts, and that it was possible to edit and amend records (balances). So it is possible that the thousands of spurious credits were paid to fraudsters and the books only balanced because the money defrauded from the system was hidden because of the thousands of spurious debits balancing the books.
Now, if any entity knows about this, it would be the organisation who built and managed the system. Who the fraudsters are could be insiders or, who knows, the system could have been designed to deliver 'project funding'. Who knows. My already low level of trust in 'the state' is, since 2020 onwards, at an all-time low. I see utterly no reason to be otherwise.
In such an event, the fraudsters would want to keep any prospective whistle-blowers tied-in and happy, would they not.
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