Enterprises are sitting on a mountain of shipping and mailing savings

Businesses constantly face the dual competing pressures of trying to manage costs while also maximizing their spend, attempting to thread the needle between these two needs so they either meet or come under budget. This has only been further exacerbated by the current business climate, where increased remote work has created a decentralized work environment that makes it even harder to control costs.

Mail and shipping may not, on paper, seem like the most obvious place to find savings. Not only is that not the case – enterprises stand to reap tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings with more efficient methods of sending packages and mail – but that misconception in the first place only proves the point of why enterprises need to implement greater transparency and scrutiny over their shipping and mailing expenses.

What’s driving your shipping and mailing costs

There are many areas where mailing and shipping may unnecessarily drive up costs:

The particular carriers selected for shipping certain parcels or documents.
The shipping services selected with those carriers (e.g. USPS First-Class Mail^® vs. Priority Mail^®).
How much time employees spend on handling inbound receivables.
Different standards for shipping and mailing processes across departments or teams within the same organization.
Lack of package carrier diversification.

All of these add up on the bottom line. And the picture becomes exponentially more complicated for enterprises that manage an entire fleet of postage meters and shipping software solutions for processing outbound shipping and mailing.

Take, for instance, a bank that has thousands of branches around the country. Thousands of branch locations also means thousands of postage meters or virtual meters – and that’s without taking other shipping and mailing devices, like intelligent lockers or inbound receiving solutions, into account. That volume of devices to keep track of simply does not make it feasible for the enterprise to have a clear, consolidated overview of its shipping and mailing expenditures; the costs are simply spread out among too many locations and devices for any enterprise of that size to be able to go through them individually in an efficient manner.

Discovering savings with analytics

Reaping savings on shipping and mailing has to start with deploying solutions that provide a bird’s eye view of total spend across all of these devices and meters. It’s not just about oversight of outbound shipping costs, either; this transparency also has to take into account the receiving piece of a shipping and mailing operation, tracking the time and associated costs spent on processing inbound packages and mail as well.

Analytics tools that can provide this high-level, detailed view of an enterprise’s fleet of shipping and mailing devices make it possible to make the operation more time- and cost-efficient. That granular level of data on items like shipping volumes or carrier rates empowers businesses to have more informed conversations with carriers for rate and volume discounts. You can’t negotiate down to more affordable rates without having the right data at your disposal first.

These data-driven solutions also empower enterprises to weed out savings far faster than tasking employees with manually searching every individual device, postage meter and cloud software for new cost opportunities. When you consider how much time that manual effort would take, the hours you rack up could effectively cancel out any other shipping or mailing savings you may end up finding. Deploying a more automated analytics solution that takes this more tedious, time-consuming manual effort out of the equation speeds up the whole process and yields new time and labor savings that you otherwise wouldn’t see.

This isn’t just about the company’s bottom line, either. Being able to weed out costly shipping and mailing inefficiencies and generate new savings presents an opportunity to reinvest that money back into the company and your employees, in the form of new intuitive technologies, worker benefits or continuous education programs. It also frees up employees to take on more meaningful or interesting work. If someone was previously spending hours on mail deliveries, and that routine can now be trimmed to down to just 20 minutes, that means more time for them to tackle new assignments and opportunities within the company.

In today’s economic climate, enterprises need to find savings wherever they can. You could be sitting on a mountain of potential savings in your shipping, mailing and receiving services – but without the proper analytical tools, you’d never know it. And at a time when everyone is working remotely, making every employee into a potential business shipper, being able to exercise greater scrutiny and transparency over the costs and time that go into your shipping and mailing functions is more essential than ever.

Pitney Bowes SendPro^® Analytics works with our suite of shipping, mailing and receiving solutions – SendPro^® family of solutions, high-volume mail machines, SendSuite^® Tracking and Intelligent Lockers – to provide a centralized, bird’s eye view of your enterprise’s total shipping and mailing spend.

For enterprises managing a fleet of shipping and mailing devices, SendPro Analytics offers a quick and intuitive interface for digging into your costs and discovering potentially tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in new hard-dollar and soft-dollar savings.