THE MAILROOM MANUAL

As organisations embrace digital workflows, the humble mailroom has turned into a critical node in enterprise information management

- 

Once upon a time, the mailroom was the heartbeat of every corporate building, humming with incoming envelopes, courier boxes, and internal pouches.

Every five minutes, someone would drop in to send or collect something. The decline in volume tells a bigger story: one of digital transformation, shifting business etiquette and evolving corporate priorities. Before COVID-19, mailrooms were mini logistics hubs handling a steady stream of gifts, food hampers, marketing kits, and official documents. Departments with generous budgets saw more packages, and festive seasons meant stacked parcels and a flurry of signatures. But with COVID, tighter budgets, and rising costs, that has become less common.

But while the number of parcels decreased, the complexity of the mailroom’s role increased. The pandemic blurred the lines between office and home as employees began requesting deliveries to personal addresses, and courier workflows adapted to track documents beyond the company gates. What was once a purely physical space, became part of a distributed logistics network.

THE TECH TURN

In earlier years, everything was manual right from logging items in thick ledgers, stamping receipts, to hand-sorting envelopes. Barcode scanners, tracking software, and digital signatures have reshaped the rhythm of work. Incoming parcels are scanned, tagged, and instantly registered into cloud systems, allowing facilities teams to track every movement in real time.