The road to business efficiency starts with the mailroom.
As one of the company’s key data centers, the mailroom oversees incoming and outbound mail, processing parcels, physical documents, and, more recently, digital files. The primary task of any mailroom is to ensure these items are delivered to their final destinations in a timely and secure manner. This task is supported by a range of additional but critical functions: data security, records management, and communication with stakeholders. All of this must be achieved on a day-to-day basis, with no room for error.
Over time, efficient mailroom operations can become more difficult to manage, especially as a company scales. While an increase in mail volume is to be expected with company expansion, this growth invites complex challenges. For example, the mailroom needs to keep track of the company’s employees, namely which departments they work in. This simple task grows exceedingly difficult as the company increases its headcount, changes worker assignments, onboards new team members, and offboards others.
If the mailroom is unable to respond swiftly to such changes, it can expose the company to security and compliance issues. With the example given of employee tracking, the inability to identify who is currently working for a particular department will create backlogs, extend the period of turnover, and allow parcels to be lost or mishandled. As a business grows and becomes more complex, an unprepared mailroom may simply lack the capacity to adapt and accommodate new concerns while conducting business as usual.
Korea’s parcel delivery market is already feeling such a strain. Across the board, companies have attempted to provide faster, next-day deliveries at lower price points to meet consumer demand even though this shorter period has increased costs, against the background of a slowing market. Several organizations, including industry leaders, have suspended their operations as they struggled to sustainably reconcile their operations with these industry changes.
While the scope of their services is fairly insulated, corporate mailroom operations should be mindful of the concerns affecting the greater industry. Companies must equip their mailrooms with a dynamic yet systematic process that allows them to adapt. Such a process starts with the mailroom management best practices, and its success depends on the use of data.
Augmenting the Mailroom Management Best Practices
The mailroom functions as a gateway for processing information. In digitizing and processing hundreds of inbound and outbound communications every day, mailrooms will gradually amass extractable insights. Information such as common package types, shipping costs, delivery periods, return-to-sender rates, and more allow managers and staff to accurately identify emerging patterns and finetune their operational practices according to the current and unique circumstances of the organization.
Listed below are a few mailroom management best practices and examples of how your data may enhance their effectiveness:
- Where manual processes can be resource-intensive and inefficient, automated solutions can operate with minimal oversight. This is the essence of technology integration. Dozens of innovative solutions are designed specifically to automate repeatable tasks or process more complex items using artificial intelligence (AI), providing for a consistent means of elevating mailroom productivity. In their 2023 Annual Report, Korea Post announced the use of AI and robotics to develop an automated parcel unloading process to boost their operations efficiency, relieve the workload from their workers, and reduce the damage rate when handling packages. They also created a safety management system meant to predict and prevent equipment failure in high-risk facilities.
- That said, the integration of technology does not mean that the human workforce should be removed. With tedious manual processes relieved from their duties, the employees can focus on enhancing the mailroom experience by developing their own capabilities for the more intricate and human aspects of the job. Strengthening customer relations and complex problem-solving, while possible with artificial intelligence, are best supported by a skilled and engaged team.
- Though more qualitative, training and engagement initiatives should be informed by the insights and pain points currently holding the mailroom back from full efficiency. Such insights gathered from customer and employee surveys, as well as productivity reports, allow companies to implement situational solutions, such as outsourcing or temporarily hiring additional people during peak seasons.
- Bridging technology with people was the core mission of Korea Post in 2023, “Brand-new Korea Post Innovating with the People,” which motivated its move towards improving the experience of its stakeholders through novel solutions, as mentioned earlier.
- As new features and programs are implemented in the mailroom, security, privacy, and transparency must be upheld through regular audits and reconciliation. Apart from KPIs, audits such as SOC I Type II are a precise means through which companies can determine whether their operations have security risks or administrative discrepancies—represented by values like error rates. Regardless of the organization’s margin of error, they must also maintain transparent communication channels to be accountable and ensure that any potential errors can be addressed immediately.
- Clear goal setting, where organizations set the metrics by which they can measure their success, such as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), should be the next step once the other practices have been implemented. Using historical data as a backdrop, the company can understand its current capabilities and project future performance with the changes made. In the mailroom’s case, data concerning processing and delivery time can be used to assess its inbound and outbound mail performance. Even the rate at which data is documented and processed can be a point of reference.
Starting with Integration
Mailroom optimization must start with the basics, or the best practices. Deceptively simple, these techniques can be transformative when equipped with insights specific to your organization, making the difference between a company-wide bottleneck and a cost-saving logistics center.
Through the mail and document logistics aspect of our business support services, we ensure that your mailroom operations are equipped with smart technology, skilled people, and thorough data analytics. To see where your transformation can begin, visit https://dbsa.asia/kr/services/2/1
