In this article Phil Hutchison, SVP and Managing Director of Mail Related Solutions, Quadient writes about the need for a new approach for parcel deliveries to businesses and organisations.
The number of packages sent in the UK has grown exponentially over the past decade, with 4.2 billion parcels sent in the 2020/21 fiscal year (up more than 1.3 billion parcels from the previous year). This means that the amount of deliveries arriving at businesses – from educational institutions to hospitals – is on the rise, which is posing problems. To ensure that parcels are delivered safely to their final recipient – not just abandoned at the front desk to be lost or stolen – we need a smarter solution.
When ‘pass the parcel’ goes wrong
When a parcel is delivered to a residential address, the path to its intended recipient is usually fairly short and straightforward. However, in businesses, the journey of a parcel, package, or letter is often nowhere near as smooth sailing. Take an office building, for example, or perhaps a hospital with thousands of employees and patients. When a package reaches the front desk, it’s far from guaranteed that it will make it to the intended recipient. They might be in an office at the other side of the building, on annual leave that day, or might have moved offices since the front desk last checked. What’s more, receptionists and concierge staff can’t spend hours trying to locate the intended recipient of a package.
Lost parcels aren’t merely inconvenient to the business and a timewaster for staff – they can have a serious impact, particularly when crucial items or documents are lost. One industry that faces this challenge is healthcare. If valuable samples are lost before they can reach their destination, this wastes patients’ time, creates unnecessary hurdles, and vastly racks up costs. For instance, consider the popularity of home testing kits for COVID-19. If these samples were delivered to the necessary labs too late, they would have been rendered unusable, causing major knock-on effects for patients and communities.
These scenarios also present huge problems for other industries. For example, agricultural businesses can’t afford for rare or important seeds or samples to be lost – or for their journey to take so long that the sample deteriorates and becomes useless.
The legal sector is another area that stands to be impacted by lost or stolen parcels. Legal professionals are often reliant upon delivery companies to transport crucial and confidential documents from one department or business to another – and they can’t afford for these items to be lost in transit or end up on the wrong desk.
Stamping out these problems
To solve these problems, organisations need to be able to track every touchpoint a package passes through on its journey to the final recipient – from the initial hand-off at the parcel depot, to delivery at the building door, all the way to every person who handles the package. This approach prevents packages from being lost or stolen once inside the building, optimising the delivery process by pinpointing any areas of the journey that are contributing to bottlenecks or delays. In this way, delivery businesses can eliminate the need to make repeat deliveries – which are costly and fuel-consuming.
Businesses can adopt this approach by embracing mail tracking systems. They can give businesses end-to-end visibility into internal delivery activity, as well as giving recipients more information about their parcel’s location. This means businesses are able to discover the time a parcel arrived at the business, where it is physically located at any particular time, and who signed for it. Some services even offer enhanced signature confirmation, providing a signature and a typed name to ensure legibility and clarity for administrators.
Information about the parcel is then easily accessible, with services able to be used on any computer, and by multiple users simultaneously. This allows employees to locate packages and trace the internal movement history of a parcel via a desktop or app. These mail tracking tools help organisations to increase reliability, enabling them to guarantee that a parcel is delivered to the correct person and ends up in safe hands.
Delivering a solution for tomorrow’s parcels
With a growing number of parcel deliveries to homes and businesses, there is an urgent need to transform the way packages and letters are delivered to organisations. Even in the case of domestic deliveries, one in ten people have parcels lost or stolen – and these deliveries should be simple and straightforward. Now imagine how many complications arise when dealing with deliveries to organisations, where packages face longer distances to travel from the front door and are handled by many more people.
To ensure parcels reach their destination and avoid any roadblocks in the delivery process, businesses need a smarter approach, tracking every touchpoint a package makes on the route to its final recipient. In this way, deliveries can become more efficient, sustainable, and cost-effective.