Flexible Mail Processing: An Application of Integral Postal Engineering

摘要

As a mass production process, today's mail processing system has difficultycoping with the rapidly changing market. Flexibility, at present not a characteristic of the postal system, is seen as its major challenge. The Postal Service has tackled the problem by creating business units. These largely self-supporting sub-organizations divide the postal organization into smaller parts that concentrate on different market segments. This study has adopted a different approach to flexibility, namely inherent flexibility, which refers to the large range of possibilities for putting the system into practice. The study can be summarized in three words: invention, innovation, and engineering. Invention is the utilization of information throughout the postal system (assumed to cover a country or other large area) to control all the processing directly. Innovation is the objective of the thesis: to define the functional architecture of a flexible postal system based on inherent flexibility. This leads to integral postal engineering. The present aim of postal engineering is to switch from manpower to automation in order to reduce costs. The emphasis is on developing machinery. Integral postal engineering aims at the coordinated, synchronized development of system and machine levels. System-level integration is achieved by an information network. Machinery has to be developed that 'listens' to the information.