| Article ID: | iaor200962676 |
| Country: | Turkey |
| Volume: | 19 |
| Issue: | 3 |
| Start Page Number: | 17 |
| End Page Number: | 34 |
| Publication Date: | Jul 2008 |
| Journal: | Endstri Mhendislii Dergisi |
| Authors: | Kayaligil Sinan, Atamer Busra, Cetin Abdullah S, Eke Dogan, Oruc Sercan, Sen Fatma, Cilingir Canan |
| Keywords: | distribution, organization |
Post processing centers are used as important distribution nodes in postal services of Organization of Post and Telegraph (PTT) and Ankara Post Processing Center (APIM) is the largest post processing center of Turkey. APIM is mainly responsible for four main processes; collection, sorting, delivery and transportation. Total organizational improvement project aims to improve relevant processes in order to satisfy main stakeholders of the relevant system, to construct a new organizational structure for APIM in order to keep those improvements permanent, and complete the study with transmissible implementations in order to transfer the study to other postal processing centers in Turkey. As a result of detailed system analysis, problem definition is stated as: ‘the organization structure and processes are not suited to stakeholders due to being ineffectively designed.’ Sorting and delivery are determined as core processes and total organizational improvement alternatives are designed by combining improvement ideas designed for problematic steps of core processes. For sorting process, improvement ideas are designed and combined and sorting process alternatives are built. Within the context of ‘clustering delivery areas’ study conducted for delivery process, delivery areas are clustered and their standard work loads are determined with linear programming models. Within the context of ‘determining the delivery areas by partitioning’ study, delivery areas are rebuilt with an integer programming model by taking time, weight and energy capacities of postpersons into account. In order to build total organizational improvement alternatives, improvement ideas for both processes and studies done for delivery process are combined. Total organizational improvement alternatives are compared according to performance measures defined with simulation models. With the proposed total organizational improvement alternatives, the percentage of mail reaching their recipients within two days is anticipated to increase from 22% to 79%, mean flow time of the mail to decrease from 4.2 days to 1.9 days and the standard deviation of flow to decrease from 2.7 days to 1.2 days.