Simulation - a key tool to accelerate and add confidence to postal network configuration

Postal operators are increasingly facing new challenges to maintain competitiveness - most have already played the "card" of facility consolidation and introduction of automation to reduce processing costs. How exactly should a given infrastructure/network and transportation strategy be changed to meet the upcoming challenges? Should mail streams be consolidated to enable further automation? Should the product portfolio be revised to accommodate for new competitive marked drivers? Obviously, the postal industry has a strong need for advanced decision support tools that can address its dynamics and complexity. The author explains how postal organisations have benefited from discrete event simulation to accelerate and add confidence to decision making. The simulation model described is designed for "end-to-end" analysis of the logistic value chain. In that way it can establish a nation wide (or area wide) general view of the cause-effect relationships in a complex postal system.