Attention! Are your battle stations ready? Is the mailroom fortified?

Black Friday approaches.

It may be a bit extreme to call Black Friday a battle, but it does mark one of the mailroom’s most challenging periods in the year. It’s a weeks-long event that kicks off the holiday season, after all.

This 2024, Black Friday will fall on November 29. Cyber Monday follows on December 2nd, but the shopping starts weeks before Thanksgiving. As early as October, the Black Friday buzz is loud and clear.

E-commerce and online shopping sit at the heart of this long frenzy. Property managers, reception clerks, and mailroom staff face the brunt of it.

Your preparations should start as soon as possible. If you’re caught off guard, the consequences will be devastating: delayed packages, dissatisfied tenants, overwhelmed staff, security concerns, and more.

1. Get the Data and Plan.

It goes without saying, but your plans should be grounded in accurate data. How else can you move forward, if you don’t know what your organization has gone through?

Data comes in many forms. The more information you can acquire, the better.

• Past quantitative data: Look at how your mailroom performed this time in previous years. What were the delivery volumes? What types of packages were usually delivered? How long did it take for recipients to collect their items? Keep an eye out for any trends.
• Current quantitative data: Compare that information with the current numbers. What is your mailroom’s parcel capacity? How many parcels are pending for pick-up right now? Has the staff been performing consistently? Are the appliances functioning?
  • The simplest method is to get the percent increase of these data points from the week before Black Friday to the week of. Then, apply the increase to this year’s data points.
• Qualitative data: The numbers don’t tell the full story, so get feedback. Cast a wide net and seek suggestions from your staff and recipients.

Once you’re equipped with all of this evidence, you know what to expect.

If delivery volumes have doubled or tripled with each passing year, you need to increase capacity or bring on extra hands. If your residents tend to order furniture, perishables, or fragile items during these sales, then you can make extra room for large packages, get a temporary freezer, or inform your staff to be more careful with package handling.

Contingencies like these are key.

But, don’t spend too long gathering your data! You might overshoot the deadline. This doesn’t mean you should stop the data collection, though. Whatever information you obtain after you’ve made your plans can be used for adjustments or next year’s preparations.

Parcel Tracker gathers much of your quantitative data and generates analytics reports to streamline this process.

2. Audit the Storage.

In the battleground of the mailroom, the parcels are fighting for storage space. A spot on the shelf is prime capital, but you only have so many spots.

There’s a two-fold solution to this problem.

First, streamline your systems so that items are collected as fast as they’re delivered. (More on that later.)

Second, know the exact capacity of your storage area. This includes the capacity for boxes, people, and traffic.

• Determine the flow of traffic in the mailroom.
  • When they enter, where do recipients wait and collect their items?
  • How do staff get from the front desk to the storage room?
  • Where are the bottlenecks?

Crowding people near doorways inhibits movement, so try to direct queues away from your entrances. Workstations for time-consuming tasks like encoding or reading documents are disruptive, so those should be placed in low-traffic areas. Untouched spaces are also opportunities for additional storage or low-use appliances.

Basically, make sure that people are evenly spread across the mailroom.

• Can your labeling system keep up with the demand? Ideally, your tagging system is simplified—with only a handful of common categories (size, type, etc.).

If your system is too complicated, then the staff will spend much more time sorting. Since these packages are supposed to be picked up quickly, you don’t need to sort the medium items from the medium-large ones. But, it may be handy to know the perishables from the non-perishables.

• Are the instructions clear? Make sure that your signage and infographics are understandable, and make sure that the staff understands them.
• Are there pending pick-ups? Make sure that the oldest packages are collected as soon as possible. This goes along with a sound labeling system; staff should be able to identify immediately what parcels have been sitting for a while.
• Are there enough supplies? It might be time for a supply run on staples or tape. Small blockages lead to bigger holes down the road.

Once you’ve completed your audit, make the adjustments! Remove your bottlenecks by rearranging the stations and appliances. Remove unnecessary labels and instructions. Have old parcels collected. Do a supply run.

If you’ve realized that the shelving or the stations are difficult to move, mounting them with wheels or replacing them with modular units should be the way to go. Make your mailroom adjustable.

If you’re anticipating packages more than your current capacity, you’ll need to purchase temporary storage units or offload items to an empty room.

Once you’ve accomplished all those changes, do this important step: check again!

Even if you’ve just inspected your systems and signage, a second check is key. There may be areas you looked over or didn’t prioritize the first time.

A mock trial or a test run is a great way to involve the entire staff. Not only can you simulate what will happen on D-Day, but their unique perspectives can spot redundancies or opportunities for improvement.

3. Automate.

Everyone’s hands are likely to be full, so relieving the staff of as many tedious tasks as possible will let them work optimally. You’re ensuring that their personal capacities won’t be overloaded.

This is where digital solutions like mailroom management software shine. Dozens of modern innovations are on the market to make tasks a breeze.

• Barcode Scanning and OCR: You can automate package login and logout with scanners and OCR (optical character recognition) technology and do away with manually logging delivery information.
• Digital logs and tags: These work in tandem with your physical labeling system to easily find packages according to different categories and storage areas.
• Notifications and reminders: You can automatically notify recipients via SMS and email about the status of their packages. You can even include announcements or special instructions that let people know what to do before entering the mailroom.
  • For best results, you can configure the software to send out multiple notifications a day.

These three solutions alone can greatly reduce the time spent on documentation and answering inquiries while encouraging timely pickup.

Let’s run an example. From our data, it takes about 145 seconds to manage a parcel on average. Using mailroom management software like Parcel Tracker drops that to 40 seconds. In a residential building with 3000 tenants who each receive about 1 parcel a month, you’ll end up saving 1,050 hours a year by using Parcel Tracker.

4. Gather Temporary Resources.

Sometimes, the frenzy is just too much. Either volumes are way too high or arriving all at the same time. This is common in high-rise condominiums, universities, and offices.

So, it doesn’t hurt to bring on temporary staff. Many hands make for light work, after all.

If the budget is tight, you can bring manpower from other departments. Employees adept at organization and admin work, like warehouse staff or front desk clerks, may be extra helpful in these situations.

If the budget allows, you can hire additional staff members just for the season.

As discussed earlier, you can increase storage capacity by acquiring additional shelving or bins—for a marginal increase. If there are dozens or even hundreds more deliveries to be expected, then extra rooms may be necessary.

As a last resort, you can extend the mailroom’s working and pickup hours. This helps spread foot traffic out over the course of the day, which in turn reduces congestion and relieves the staff of immediate stress.

5. Conduct Post-Season Analysis.

This solution stands out as your preparation for the following Black Friday.It all boils down to one main question: were your preparations enough?

This is where you have conversations with your staff and recipients.

How did the staff perform? Were they able to keep up with the demand? Was additional storage needed? Were the recipients satisfied with their service? Did a whole other factor affect their experience, like waiting time, congestion, or other things on the property?

Once you’ve done all of these, you should be ready for Black Friday.

Ready to Roll?

Black Friday marks an exciting time, but all that excitement can and will overwhelm a property. If you’re properly prepared, you can channel that excitement into productivity and satisfaction.

Parcel Tracker’s mailroom management solutions save a lot of time when time is short. From automated documentation to analytics generation, you’ll have the right tools on hand. Start a free trial and see the frenzy boom.