Optimising internal benchmarking of mail delivery at PostNL

The recent decrease in mail volume resulted in a decline in income of PostNL Mail. Therefore, PostNL has to become more cost efficient in order to stay profitable within the mail sector. The delivery of mail is the highest element of expenditure within the mail sector of PostNL. Hence, there is an urgent need to increase the efficiency of delivery. PostNL introduced benchmarking between the delivery areas of the Netherlands to learn from each other and to exchange best practices between the delivery areas. However, the set-up of the benchmarking is lacking, in particular, the benchmarking model incorporates unsuitable performance measures and unrepresentative clusters, and the benchmarking sessions are improvable. The goal of this research is to develop an internal benchmarking model with adequate performance measures and clusters as a tool for process managers to determine best practices and performance gaps regarding mail delivery