The Office Services or Mailroom space plan requires a careful consideration of mail routings in order to maximise efficiency. Planning the furniture and equipment in different ways can affect productivity significantly. Illustrated below are examples of ‘Bad Work Flow’ (left) where the mail and staff cross back and forth, to be compared against ‘Good Work Flow’ (right) where the mail flows smoothly and unobstructed through the mailroom from start to finish. In this example we are showing a large and regularly-proportioned room although many companies are unable to provide this consideration.

Take time to consider a simple equation by calculating time saved from good workflow and good ergonomics; two minutes saved every hour saves more than one week of total time every year. Appropriate furniture and a good layout can help to realise this equation, reduce costs, increase efficiency or productivity and maintain order in a safe and tidy environment.

 

Planning the efficient Mailroom

Next Steps

Learn more about Planning the efficient Mailroom, speak to our team on 01494 768 870

The furniture selection and planning lay-out of “The Post Room” is overlooked to your detriment. The Concept of Modular Mailroom Furniture, Mailrooms, Facilities Hubs or Office Services Environments, are the glue that keep an office running effectively and the larger the organisation the more essential the efficiency and ergonomic effectiveness of the back office. A well-planned mailroom can improve document flow, monitor activity levels, provide supplementary facilities services such as stationery or consumables distribution, provide a location and a labour resource for remote reprographics and in-house document publishing, or act as the hub for electronic document management digitising, direct marketing control, customer relationship management or office security.

As the pressure of internal and incoming postage distribution diminishes, owing to the use of e-mail or cloud-based template completion, it is easy to imagine that the volume of work in a Mailroom has commensurately decreased. However, the development of new communications methodologies in the general office have often coincided with a decrease in labour capacity in the mail room and an increase in additional functionality and responsibility for the remaining employees. This puts pressure on the efficiency of Office Services and in turn demands an optimum lay-out plan.

In these challenging and changing times new technological breakthroughs appear almost on a weekly basis that threaten the construct that physical post is still an important part of the communications equation. Of course for all companies the proportion of physical to electronic post has certainly changed, although the required space required to efficiently sort, distribute, collect, frank and send information through a physical information flow may not have done so. The volume may have diminished, but the actions required still remain.

There is now all the more reason to select a furniture layout that is flexible, reconfigurable, recyclable and robust enough to be re-usable by moving from location to location.

The alternative? Perhaps you could build a permanent set of joinery-contracted workstations and benches for contemporaneous requirements…………and then knock them down and re-build them in a year’s time when advances in technology change the method of document flow once again. This would of course be a costly waste of resources.

However, for any workplace it is important to have an understanding of The Document Flow Cycle.

Next Steps

Learn more about The Concept of Modular Mailroom Furniture, speak to our team on 01494 768 870