It’s true! When purchasing and operating package management solutions there are several lesser-known ways to impact capacity, making your investment go further!
Rooms can provide much more capacity and flexibility than lockers with the same ability to secure and have visibility to packages. Save staff time and energy by ensuring you have visibility to packages and having a room that is monitored by the solution provider. The trade-off is time and security. Package lockers provide a higher level of security and autonomy by securing packages in individual lockers. This decreases auditing time and reduces overall “package grabbing” theft.
If you’re comparing package locker solutions, be sure to consider the actual capacity of the locker system. Generally, this is reflected in “locker doors”. Tower is a more ambiguous term referring to the actual hardware vs. the capacity of the hardware itself.
Some locker systems provide a clever solution with a single large locker. This works great for ensuring larger packages like rugs, tvs and sporting equipment can be securely delivered. But maybe you didn’t know that they generally have a function you can turn off or on to provide multiple packages in the one large locker allowing several packages to be delivered and secured within it. This is a great option for holidays, amazon prime days and move-ins when your locker system has a tendency to reach capacity. It is important however that this type of locker is treated like a room and monitored for possible “package grabbing”. (It also means you can save money when purchasing a system by purchasing to your average demand vs. your highest capacity needs.)
One of the newest, slickest functions we’ve encountered is “multi-package delivery”. This allows the consolidation of multiple deliveries to the same resident in the same locker (vs. each delivery going to a different locker). Here’s how it works, Amazon delivers a package to Elizabeth Erickson at 9:05am. At 3:20pm Amazon delivers a second package and they are prompted that Elizabeth already has a package in the system and asks them if they’d like to deliver this package to the same locker. Boom! Two packages, but taking up only one locker, increasing your system’s capacity. If you’re purchasing a system be sure to ask about this, if you have an existing locker system, ask if this is an option that can be enabled.
Every package management system benefits from regular audits. Conducting audits can greatly boost a systems’ efficiency, security, and capacity. Here are some key points to consider when auditing your existing system:
In addition to giving the property team a good sense of how the system is working and being utilized, auditing ensures:
Weekly audits are recommended for package lockers. Daily audits are recommended for package rooms since there is a tendency for packages to be moved, misplaced or dumped. Performing audits in the morning can be beneficial as many packages will have been picked up in the evening hours and carriers haven’t started delivering yet.
Staying ahead of growing demand and leveraging the insights gained from audits, allows properties to fine-tune its operations for efficiency, anticipate future capacity and feature demands (like cold storage), and optimize for cost savings.
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