The Misconception:

A major misconception is that online shopping has taken over globally, forcing traditional brick and mortar stores to shut down. This couldn’t be further away from the truth, online shopping only accounts for 14% [1] of total retail sales in the UK and only 8.1% in North America [2]. This is however quickly changing, and by 2021 it is expected to nearly double in the UK alone [3]. Let me put that into context, if a building is receiving in 2019 100 parcels daily, it will receive 200 in 2021.

How its getting worse:

This effect is further accentuated as those living in concierged/receptioned buildings often pay a premium for that service, suggesting a higher purchasing power. This means that they are likely to shop more than the average consumer and as their consumption trends change from high street to online shopping, you could easily expect 3- or 4-fold increase in the number of parcels arriving at your building daily.

Why is it a problem:

But why are such influxes of parcels an issue for residential, office and university buildings? Its simple; to process a parcel at a reception/building, the building staff must put in work, which costs money. Our industry research across 3 property managers has shown that with traditional parcel logging techniques it takes about 115 seconds to process a single parcel.

Let’s Do the Maths:

If you are receiving 100 parcels a day, that’s over 800 hours a year logging parcels and packages. This costs an average of 12,000 GBP in wages (15GBP/Hr). For some larger buildings the costs are drastically higher, there might be 1 or more dedicated staff members just for handing deliveries and logging parcels, which comes to a full salary for just managing packages.

Yet Another Problem With Parcels:

Parcel deliveries also triple during the weeks of Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas. This causes building managers to add additional temp staff at the receptions, which can cost thousands a year.

Don’t lose parcels!

Courier liability for signed packages stops as soon as the parcel is delivered to the front of house staff. This leaves the critical “last yard” of the delivery under front of house staff liability, effectively the building manager.

Logging and tracking what happen in this part of the process is critical; full accountability and trackability of parcels within building is required to avoid losing parcels by theft or giving them to the wrong person. This becomes particularly a sensitive issue if the building in question has high net worth individuals ordering expensive items, an office receiving sensitive documents or a university receiving expensive research chemicals/materials.

Save time and money:

Here comes the shameless promotion or our Internal Parcel Tracking System. Over the last 2 years we have been able to use cutting edge camera technologies to cut this parcel processing time from 115 seconds down to average to 41 seconds. This 3-fold cut in time managing parcels and guarantees that front of house staff are able to attend to the plethora of duties they have in a timely manner. Parcel Tracker also eliminates the need to hire temp staff at peak online shopping times such as black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas!

Parcel Tracker is truly an investment that directly saves time and resources to any property manager all while providing an excellent experience to its residents.

If however you wish to implement a free parcel management process at your building I suggest you stay tuned for our next article by signing up to our mailing list!

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