The holiday season is a busy time of year for deliveries but even with the festivities now behind us, post rooms are handling a backlog of parcels and letters, not to mention deliveries that went uncollected before and, for retailing outlets, returned goods.
With each passing year, online shopping generates more and more parcels. This year, online shopping in the holiday season (November and December) was forecast to be 25 per cent higher in the UK, France and Germany compared with the same period in 2017. That’s a lot of parcels to be delivered and some, no doubt, went to places of work.
Locating recipients and getting deliveries to them can be a multi-stage process that eats up post room time and prevents staff from getting on with other activities. Add to that multi-site mail processing and things can get even more complicated. If parcels get held up, or go missing, even more time can be spent trying to locate them, while lost business deliveries may have to be replaced - spend that could be avoided.
If missing mail contains sensitive information, it can be a security issue which all businesses want to avoid.
Internal parcel tracking: take out the guesswork with inbound mail tracking software
Manual processes for tracking parcels can be inefficient and lack transparency. Inbound mail tracking software can turn this around with seamless parcel recording and tracking from the time packages arrive on-site through to the time they arrive at their destination. There, electronic proof of delivery can be captured.
You have full control of the process through:
- Recording and labelling software which registers scanned mail. Recipients can be identified from an address book and notified of their parcel's delivery by email
- Handheld scanning devices to scan barcodes on the mail at each stage of delivery for real-time status tracking. On delivery, recipients record their signatures on the device and notifications are sent back to the central control system
- Parcel tracking software, enabling items to be securely tracked through a web portal, with scanning history and proof of delivery.
It’s an end-to-end process that supports accountability and visibility by providing an audit trail for the tracking of parcels. At any time of year, it can help your post room meet demands placed on it by inbound deliveries.
