Research On Post Office's Location And Optimization

As constantly innovation of information technology, adjustment of economicstructure and globalization of business development, the competition between similarenterprise more and more intensifies: the correctly post office location is the basic ofsuccess. The selection of post office location is quite different from common PublicFacilities; and it also has a big difference with common Trading area, which onlyfocuses on the Sales profit, so there is a big challenge on the post office location. Forthese reason, it is meaningful, using the related theory to scientific and systematicstudy problem about post office location and efficiency optimization.1, review of related theory and researchThe post office location is based on the traditional theory of location selection,including Business circle theory, land value theory and minimum difference theory.In Business circle theory, business circle is a Approximate circle region, with locationof retail enterprise as its center, with biggest sales radiation ability as its radius.Contents of this theory are: Reilly Model, Huff Model, Retail saturated theory,Heartland theory and Black Model (Black-Scholes Option Pricing Model).All thesemodel research different factors, which impacts trading area's attraction. Land valuetheory includes the early land value theory and competition hire model of new classicurban. Minimum difference theory is based on Hotelling competition model, itresearches the issue, how can a enterprise attract more customers by sales outletarrangement, in order to win Innovation benefit and competition benefits.Trading area theory, land value theory and minimum difference theory for Postlocation selection provides a strong theoretical support. But, post office should coverWidespread public service requirements, it has a certain public facility locationfeatures. So we could not only research this issue as a common trading area location,but also take care of Public welfare functions and commercial functions of post office.For all the reasons above, we must treat this issue using dialectic and developing way. 2, the double functions of Post office netThe Post Office must provide its Permanent postal services"of high quality"to"all customers"in"all regions", so it has a public function. Meanwhile, aftergovernment -enterprise separation, as a common economic enterprise, post officeattends into market competition with its competitive business; Because of itsindependent system operation, post office is responsible for its own profits and lossand it also has a commercial functions. Double functions of post office cause itself toface many difficulties and contradictions in process of post office location andoperation. First of all, about post office service scope problem, in another word, thereis a contradiction between service scope and economical running cost. Expanding thescope of the universal service will cause improve running cost, it has conflict with itseconomical function; on the contrary, post office may have a certain conflict with itspublic function, when it narrow its service scope .Secondly, the contradiction betweenquantity of setting location and key area. The public function request enough postoffices located in whole country, especially in remote area, in order to cover therequirement of public service, but these areas are competition business heavy lossesarea with conflict against economic function of itself. Thirdly, during post officelocation selecting, when not both, how should we make a choice, public service orcompetition business. Still, double functions of post office are harmonious in the finalanalysis. Economic function exist in its daily running, at the same time post officecarry on its competitive business, not only to share huge upfront input, but also tobring a fabulous income in later daily business running. Meanwhile, just because ofits good performance on public function, post office has good reputation, earn thetrust of the society and user support and rapid development of competitive business.3, The Post office location select under its double functionsBecause of double functions, selection of post office location must be separatelytreaded, Specific include the following three kinds of cases: 1.As the prerequisite,current service level cover public requirements, the selection of post office locationcan devoted its profitability function, it is Similar to location select of financialnetwork. Then we can treat this issue as a selection of Hotelling location. At the sametime, we can keep the balance between both side, according to their credibility; 2. When service level of post office can not cover public requirements, we must payhigh attention to universal service of post office. Regulators using the specialsubsidies encourage postal enterprise adding post outlets, improving their universalservice quality. But not true info may cause a issue, that Postal enterprises take themoney used to improve the competitive business level, thus strengthen supervision isnecessary; 3. When we need take care of both universal service and economicbusiness at the same time, this issue can be summarized as two stage location pricingmodel, in order to realize the universal service level and improve the economicbenefits of the dual goals.4, Selection model of post office locationTo cover all user's requirements, under this premise, how can we minimize thebuilding cost, this issue is not exactly suit for issue about selection of post officelocation. Selection of post office location is based on covering user requirement ofuniversal service, on the other hand it need provide same high quality service to usersfrom different type and get the same satisfaction from different users, we also need toconsider total user quantity in a post office outlet, in order to make sure economyalive of this post office. For this reason, we bring time satisfaction and Thresholdconstraints, these two variables, into traditional location set covering model, to builda location set covering model of post office with time and Threshold constraintscontents. We can discuss Greed heuristic algorithm of this model, using Metlabprogram to do simulate calculation in order to get a good convergent effect.5, Optimization of post office efficiencyThe optimization of post office's efficiency guides us to make a good choice bypost office selection. In the same Scale benefit, analysis of Comprehensive technicalefficiency indicates, overall performance of post office is not so good, and comparedwith its competitive business, the performance of its universal service business iseven bad. After research, we found that, the post office, which is near to trading area,with a long set-time, has usually a good performance. But some post office is notlocated in a downtown area, but in a rather big residential area, it also has a goodperformance. Except all examples above, the post office with a middle scale has abetter performance than other post office. Pure technical efficiency under variable scale efficiency indicates, its total pure technical efficiency level is quite better thanComprehensive technical efficiency. And compared with universal service business,pure technology of competitive business has more effective nets with a higherinput-output rate. Scale efficiency analysis indicates, post office, which has outletpoints 5-8 and staff quantity 4-9, has a higher Outlets scale efficiency. But when weconsider these two issues separate, 10 or so seats for a competitive business is themost efficiency. But 3 or so seats for a universal service business is at most efficiency.These conclusions are the important factors in processing post office location.6, the main innovation of studiesThese studies'innovations exist in below 3 points: 1. According to post office'sdouble function in our country, we build a static location selection under a certainuniversal service level, a static location under a improving universal service level andvariance location selection under double goals. We discussed separately possibleexistence of equilibrium state; it is meaningful to selection of post office location inour country; 2. Put time satisfaction and threshold constraints into traditional locationset covering model, build a location set covering model for post office with timesatisfaction and threshold constraint, in order to make our decision more suitable foractual situation; 3. Input and output determination method proposed, using CRSmodel and VRS model in DEA, we mad relative effectiveness evaluation to sampleoutlet, which is based on Input and output data of 104 post offices, this evaluationprovide Beneficial enlightenment for selection of post office location.