Strategic Re-design of Urban Mail and Parcel Networks at La Poste
We devise a decision model that allows La Poste, the French postal operator, to assess the benefits of merging the urban mail and parcel delivery networks which used to be run as separate entities. Based on data from the French city of Nantes, we find that merging the mail and parcel delivery yields cost benefits of around 3\% which prove to be robust under various scenarios tested. These findings corroborated management's expectation of cost savings and entailed a new organizational structure.