PostNL’s Monday route

Due to the Internet, email, and social media, the amount of mail has been decreasing for years, which is why PostNL only delivers truly urgent mail on Mondays: mourning cards and medical packages. That’s not a lot of mail: on average it’s around 35,000 pieces of mail each Monday, compared to 8 million pieces per day on other days. Despite the small amount, though, all pieces obviously have to be delivered correctly and on time. PostNL asked Geodan how that could be done as efficiently as possible.

On Mondays, a mail carrier doesn’t walk the regular round through his or her familiar neighborhood. They get in the car and drive around town and country to deliver mail at various locations: the Monday route. Geodan draws up this route on Sunday night - at 4AM to be precise. That’s when we know how many mail items need to be delivered and where.

The process is as follows. The delivery addresses of all letters are automatically registered in the PostNL sorting center. This lets Geodan know exactly which letters and packages need to be delivered on Monday and where. GeodanMaps - our cloud platform for location-intelligence solutions - then calculates how a mail carrier can travel along all addresses as smartly as possible. That’s how we make sure that there’s a list of addresses for every mail carrier on every Monday morning.

With the Monday-route service - which Geodan developed in only 4 months - PostNL has a secure and multifunctional cloud solution for all logistical processes in which mail, parcels, or other items are not delivered on a fixed route.