In a bid to improve quality of service provided by courier operators and to expose them on the ways things, Courier Regulatory Department (CRD) of the Nigerian Postal Service (Nipost) last week gathered stakeholders in the industry to a seminar.
The title of the 2-day seminar "Modern Trends in Courier Business" coincided with one of themes of the ongoing Universal Postal Congress in Switzerland."The Post : Opening the Doors for World Trade for the Smallest Businesses" is similar to Modern Trends in Courier Business as both strive to inculcate in people the requisite information needed to start a courier business or turn around already existing one.
The postal sector is an essential component of the global economy and therefore prone to the shocks and behaviors of the external environment.
The modern day 21st century , old ways of doing business including running errands are now paving way for modern trends especially with the information age that has tended to restructure the scope and shape of business concerns.
The Courier Regulatory Department in responding to this change which is coming on the heels of its previous successful lecture tagged "Government-Operator Interface in Courier Business" held in April, redesigned the content and this time tried to equip courier professionals with the fundamentals needed in operating a modern and profitable courier business.
Olaniran Fafowora, national customers manager, DHL was one of the resource persons and he brought his wealth of experience spanning decades in the banking and courier industry to bear when he handled Mailroom Management on the first day of the lecture.
Mailroom which he defined as a room, in which incoming and outgoing mails are handled for a company or other organizations, is no doubt a modern system which many organizations are adopting. Because most of these organizations want to concentrate on their areas of competencies, there is therefore the need for them to outsource some of their services outside their core competencies to other companies that specialize in those areas. Courier companies become favored to manage and operate mailrooms that have become the nucleus of information for most companies.
Mailroom management as espoused by Fafowora, is the planning, organizing, controlling both human and capital resources of incoming and outgoing mails and parcels within the mailroom in the most efficient and effective manner to achieve the organization’s objective.
To drive his point, Fafowora took participants to various areas of mailroom management including the setting up of a mailroom, the organizational structure, securing the mailroom, functions of the mailroom, proposed set up, among others while the second speaker, Adetola Olabajo, executive director, Errand Express delved into Courier Service Network which is another important area in the modern day business that involves the courier.
A courier service network in a courier and logistics industry as given by Olabajo refers to a chain of offices opened and linked together in order to perform complimentary services for each other so that the organization’s goals are achieved.
While taking participants at the event to so many areas things to consider in networking, Olabajo said that with networking, you already the power of courier service even as he told the audience that there were so many innovations possible in the courier industry with network and that courier is no longer limited to a physical office. Mail Delivery Management, Track and Trace and Fleet Management were also deliberated upon on the second day of the interesting seminar that witnessed large turnout of courier practitioners.
