Reduce friction between processes and people

Your office manager works hard. As one of the first points of contact for visitors, and the go-to resource for a majority of your employees’ operational issues, they field dozens of questions throughout their busy day with grace and a smile. If they had to rank these questions in order of frequency –– from fellow employees and visitors –– the top three questions would be:  

1. “Can I get the WiFi password?”
2. “Where’s the restroom?”
3. “Did my package arrive yet?”

With the steady growth of e-commerce, ability to order quickly from our mobile devices from anywhere, and super-fast shipping, it’s no surprise that more and more employees get their packages delivered to your office. 

This is convenient for your employees, but from a practical and logistical standpoint? All of these workplace deliveries can create quite the burden for office managers and front desk teams typically tasked with delivery management. This delivery management is time-consuming, and might include:

• Package intake from a third party shipping vendor
• Storage and space maintenance
• Making sure packages get to the people that ordered them 
• Reminding employees to pick up their deliveries

Without an automated, digital delivery management process, you can bet that the list of questions they get is only growing –– and that “where’s my package?” is fast becoming the most-asked.

The pitfalls of ad-hoc delivery management

An unfortunate byproduct of inefficient delivery management is the potential for interpersonal conflict. People can get frustrated with an office manager or person tasked with delivery management if a package is left in a mailroom for days, but the recipient never received a notification. Employees can also get antsy, repeatedly asking the office manager questions about whether or not deliveries have come for the day. 

For example, the delivery may have come in when the office manager was away from the desk, and another colleague might have signed for the package. This also opens up the possibility for package mix-ups, where an employee accidentally takes someone else's package.

Without a streamlined intake system, these kinds of situations can arise. What can digital delivery management do to fool-proof your mailroom? 

• Keep your workplace in good security compliance by requiring employees to sign for or take a picture of themselves when they pick up a package. This ensures the right package goes to the right person.
• Automate notifications throughout every step of the package intake process. As soon as deliveries arrive, all it takes is a scan of the package label, and a notification with a photo of the package is automatically sent out to the recipient. Follow-up reminders are also automated until the package is marked picked up, removing the need for an office manager to do so manually.

Deliveries management software provides an agile way to plan ahead for expected challenges of the work day –– and frees your office manager up for all of the unexpected ones.

You wouldn’t individually email customers –– so why put your employees  through manual, off-the-cuff delivery notifications? 

You might assume that people are eager to pick up their packages as soon as they arrive, but 19.4% of recipients need at least one reminder notification after the initial notification before picking up their package. This means that packages are left to sit around, taking up valuable space in the office, and creating an eye-sore for visitors and employees alike. If your office manager has to individually reach out to employees to coordinate delivery pick-up, can you imagine how much time that takes? 

It can take several minutes per package to copy a tracking number by hand, manually write or type that tracking number into a logbook, and then track down a person or writing an email to notify them of their delivery. The person logging your workplace deliveries obviously has other things to do in their day. They probably don't plan for deliveries management to take up that much of their time, so this manual process cuts into time they could spend on other, more important work. 

What’s the true cost of not automating delivery management? Time –– lots of it.

Let’s say it takes a minimum of ten minutes total to manage one delivery, from the moment a package leaves the carrier’s hands to the moment it is handed to the intended recipient. If your workplace receives at least 10 packages a week, that adds up to nearly an hour and a half spent managing deliveries per week –– a whopping 72.8 hours, or nearly two work-weeks, per year.

Compare this to digital delivery management. If you’re using a digital solution, the median time it takes from the moment a package is scanned to when a notification is issued to the recipient is just 31 seconds –– a mere fraction of the time it takes to manually manage deliveries. This saves valuable labor not to mention the time it typically takes to physically locate someone.

Get the ebook on the impact of e-commerce on workplace operations and how delivery management software can help.