Package management in residential buildings has quickly become a hot topic. It seems like every day, the amount of deliveries your team has to handle just grows and grows.
Naturally, this is having a huge effect on workloads, costing site teams countless hours over the weeks and months. Not only are they fulfilling their roles as managers and resident advisers, they’re on the fringe of becoming full-time postal workers, too.
Finding the most effective way to manage parcels is key. The exponential rise in online shopping means residential buildings have to find a solution fast, as the events of 2020 alone caused delivery rates to skyrocket.
There are many package management solutions available, some of which are much better than others. To help you understand which method is right for you and your residents, we’ve put together this guide listing the top four trends for parcel management in residential buildings.
Parcel Lockers
We thought we’d start with the most well-known yet highly inefficient way of managing packages in residential buildings, and that’s parcel lockers. They’re often seen as a short-term solution, but they create a lot more headaches.
First and foremost, lockers are ugly. Imagine having a beautifully designed reception area only to fill it wall-to-wall with parcel lockers. They look even worse when they come in garish colours and they’re branded up with the locker company’s logos and slogans.
Secondly, if you do choose to go with parcel lockers, we’re not exaggerating when we say they’ll be wall-to-wall. You’ll need at least one locker per resident to keep up with online buying demands, so ordering just a small amount of them won’t do you any favours.
There’s also a lot of wasted space with lockers. Let’s say one courier drops off a book and the only parcel locker free to use is one of the more spacious ones. The courier has to use it, even though it’s a waste of space. Any courier that comes after the first will then have to leave large and bulky items at reception, which invalidates the idea of installing lockers in the first place.
Parcel lockers just don’t work in residential buildings. We’ve seen them put to reasonably good use in retail settings where customers can collect parcels alongside their weekly shop, but they don’t have a place in BTR or PBSA.
Leaving Parcels at the Front Desk
Unfortunately for your site team, this is another highly popular package management trend that does nothing to make your lives any easier. Couriers with nowhere else to store deliveries make a beeline for the front desk, leaving the concierge with a large selection of parcels to wade through.
Not only does each parcel need signing in, which takes a great deal of time, there also needs to be:
- Ample storage space for parcels
- A way to notify residents of their deliveries
- A sorting system that allows staff to find parcels again quickly when the residents come to collect them
Put simply, this trend has no rhyme or reason. It leaves you with a lot of work to handle and is highly inefficient. However, there are instances where residential buildings actually make the space they have work for them. The main problem isn’t storage, it’s tracking.
And that leads us on to our third trend.
Parcel Logging Software
Electronic parcel logging software is making the day-to-day task of package management smoother and more time-efficient for receptionists and concierges.
Let’s say you don’t have software in place at the moment. You have to manually sign in each parcel, which means logging down:
- Who the parcel is for
- Their apartment number
- When the parcel was dropped off
- When the parcel is picked up
- Who picked up the parcel
It’s a nightmare to keep track of. Parcel logging software — such as PSP Lite — drastically cuts out a lot of wasted time and energy.
Compatible with all smart devices, PSP Lite uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR), so all you have to do is take a picture of the package label. This data corresponds with the pre-built system we set up for you, which logs in the parcel and sends a push notification to the resident so they can come and collect their delivery.
To see for yourself how powerful a tool PSP Lite is, get in contact with us to see if you qualify for a free two-month trial period.
