| dc.description.abstract | In 2004, H.e. Dr Mohammad Benten was appointed president of Saudi Post (SP), a government-owned company facing critical challenges affecting its survival. The company’s customers perceived the Post as a traditional channel of communication for the exchange of letters. They believed that, due to the evolution of new technologies, the role of the Post in their daily life would become obsolete. The national mail market was also characterized by growing competition from private international logistics companies, especially in the parcel and eMS segments. Moreover, the company’s network infrastructure was unable to keep pace with the growing development of local and international businesses operating in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Indeed the company faced difficulties in efficiently providing its core service, the delivering of packages and mail. One reason behind these difficulties was the absence of a standardized postal addressing system in the country. Until recently, the citizens of the Kingdom used an inaccurate postal address to communicate by post, or had to rent a P.O. box at their nearest post office to pick up their mail. Homes did not have mailboxes at all, and the country lacked a single, unified addressing system. That limitation led various institutions, such as government agencies or private logistics companies, to create their own grids and use different addressing systems for the same location, complicating the operational process for mail as well as duplicating the infrastructure costs. /.../ | en |