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Postal organizations everywhere are under considerable pressure to improve their operations. They need to reduce costs and improve delivery performance. They desperately need to improve the utilisation of their resources, both machine and labor.

The optimal allocation of labour and machine resources within process operations is not a new problem. Manufacturing companies have been confronting resource allocation issues in their production facilities for many years. Many software tools and techniques have been developed to optimize manufacturing processes. These tools have proven to be more or less successful in various process types.

Process industries, where instead of combining components to make the end product, a single starting material is separated into streams which may be further processed or separated into many final products, have been difficult to plan and schedule with software tools. The relatively recent introduction of finite capacity scheduling software has overcome many of the limitations of previous tools.

Postal sorting facilities have many characteristics in common with manufacturing process industries that have been able to achieve improved service and significant cost reductions through the use of these tools.

A serious limitation to the use of these scheduling tools in posts has been the ability to fashion them to meet posts’ unique needs; in particular, the management of the data needed to build the schedules.

SMT has designed a solution to this and demonstrated this within Australia Post and Royal Mail in the UK.

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