Multi-hop routing
Multi-Hop Mail Routing Across Buildings, Sites and Countries
Send an item onward as many times as it needs to go, with one named person accountable for every leg and the whole journey on a single record.
Most organisations can tell you that an item arrived. Far fewer can tell you where it is now, who is holding it and which leg it is on. That gap opens as soon as an item has to travel further than the front desk.
- Every leg recorded
- One person accountable
- Across sites and borders
The gap between "it arrived" and "they have it"
One handover is easy to record. The trouble starts at the second one, and grows with every leg after that.
An item that arrives at a central postroom and is handed straight to somebody standing there is not a routing problem. Now take an item that arrives at that postroom, waits for the van to the second building, gets sorted into a departmental tray, and is finally walked upstairs by whoever was heading that way. That is four separate chances for the record to stop, and in most organisations it stops at the first one.
The expense is not lost items, which are rare. It is that nobody can answer a simple question quickly, so three people spend twenty minutes each finding out.
- The record ends at receptionThe item is logged on arrival and never touched again, so the entire internal journey is invisible.
- A new record at every siteThe item is re-entered at each location, so one journey becomes three unrelated entries that nobody can join up.
- Nobody owns it in transitAn item between two teams belongs to neither of them, and that is exactly when it stops moving.
- "It went in the van" is the whole answerWhich van, on which day, and who accepted it at the other end are all unanswerable.
- Stalled items are invisibleSomething sitting on the same leg for a fortnight looks identical to something that arrived yesterday.
- Redirects erase the historyThe recipient moved and the item was sent on, so the trail now starts from the redirect as though nothing happened before it.
- Cross-border journeys go darkAn item leaves for another country and the next confirmed sighting is a phone call asking whether it turned up.
- Nobody knows which leg is slowTurnaround is measured end to end, so the one handover causing the delay stays hidden inside the average.
If your question is about proof and custody rather than movement, internal package tracking software covers who has held an item and what evidence exists at each handover. This page is about where it goes next.
How it works
A hop is a scan, and nothing more
Routing fails when it asks people to do paperwork. Every step below is something the person handling the item was going to do anyway.
The item gets a destination
Usually the recipient implies it, because their location already says where the item is going. Where the destination is not obvious, which mostly means central intake and anything crossing sites, it is set explicitly.
Somebody sends it onward
A scan and a destination. The item leaves its current location and is marked in transit, rather than sitting in an unlogged gap between two places.
Somebody accepts it at the other end
The receiving scan is the important one. It transfers accountability to a named person and closes the leg. Until it happens the item remains the sender's responsibility, and it is visible as such.
Repeat for as many legs as it takes
Two hops or seven, the behaviour is identical, and every leg is added to the same record rather than starting a new one.
The last hop is the recipient
The final handover closes the item, with proof captured exactly as it would be on a single-hop delivery.
The journey stays readable
Afterwards the whole route sits on one record, in order, with the time each leg took. That turns "where did this go" into a thirty second question.
A worked example
One item, five hops, one record
A contract arriving at a head office for somebody based on another campus. Nothing unusual, and exactly the kind of journey that goes dark in most buildings.
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Hop one: courier to central intake
The item arrives at the main postroom and is scanned in. The courier's job ends here, and this is where most organisations stop recording anything.
AccountableThe intake team, from the moment of the scan until somebody else accepts it. -
Hop two: intake to the inter-site run
The recipient is at another campus, so the item is routed onward and leaves on the transport run. It now shows as in transit rather than simply being absent from the shelf.
AccountableWhoever took it onto the run, until it is accepted at the other end. -
Hop three: accepted at the second site
The receiving postroom scans it in. The leg closes, accountability transfers, and the elapsed time for that leg goes onto the record.
AccountableThe receiving postroom. If this scan never happens, the item still shows as in transit and somebody can go and find out why. -
Hop four: postroom to the department
Sorted and walked to the right floor, then scanned at handover. It is a short hop, and the one most likely to be skipped in a manual process because it feels too small to record.
AccountableThe department contact who accepted it, by name. -
Hop five: department to the recipient
The final handover, closed with a QR code, a signature or a photograph. The item is delivered and the journey is complete.
AccountableClosed. The recipient has it, and the proof sits on the same record as all five legs. -
Afterwards: the question nobody could answer before
Three weeks later somebody asks why it took four days. The answer is on the record: it sat at the second site for two of them, waiting for the departmental round.
VisibleTime per leg, so the slow handover can be identified rather than hidden inside an end-to-end average.
Every hop above also captures who held the item and what evidence was taken. That half of the record is covered on internal package tracking software and in the mailroom audit trail.
What routing gives you
Included as standard, on the phones and tablets your team already carries.
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Onward routing
Send an item to the next location as many times as the journey needs, without ever starting a second record.
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Accountability per leg
One named person is responsible at any moment, and responsibility transfers on the receiving scan rather than on trust.
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Where it is now
Current location and current holder on the dashboard, so the question is answered from a desk rather than a walk.
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Across sites and borders
Departments, floors, buildings, campuses and countries. A hop behaves the same way however far it goes.
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Redirects that keep the history
A recipient who has moved gets the item forwarded, with the original leg still on the record rather than overwritten.
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Stalled items surfaced
Anything sitting too long on one leg is flagged, so you find it before the recipient does.
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A hop is one scan
No forms and no data entry. If recording a handover takes longer than doing it, nobody will keep recording it.
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Works without a connection
Scans in a loading bay or a lift lobby queue on the device and sync when it reconnects, so the chain does not break.
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The whole journey, searchable
Find the item and read its route in order, by recipient, sender, reference or date.
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Time per leg
Turnaround broken down by hop, which is the only way to find the handover actually causing a delay.
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Recipients kept informed
Notifications follow the item, so a long journey does not mean silence. Each leg can update the person waiting at the end of it.
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One dashboard for every site
The whole estate on one screen, which is what makes a cross-site journey visible as a single thing.
Where items travel furthest
Routing matters in proportion to how far things move. In one small office it barely does. In these, it is most of the problem.
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University campuses
Central intake, then buildings scattered across a site, then departments inside them. Three or four hops is the normal case rather than the exception.
University mailroom software -
Hospitals
Goods in, then pharmacy, then a ward, often with clinical urgency attached and always with a handover that has to be recorded.
Hospital parcel tracking -
Multi-site organisations
Head office intake and an inter-site run, which is the most common place for a record to go quiet for two days.
Multi-site mailroom management -
Corporate headquarters
A central postroom serving many floors and departments, where the last hop is the one nobody bothers to record.
Corporate headquarters mailroom -
Legal firms
Documents moving between offices where a deadline hangs on the date, and the route itself forms part of the evidence.
Law firm mailroom software -
Government estates
Many departments and buildings under one organisation, where correspondence has to be accounted for at every transfer.
Government mailroom software
Single-point logging against multi-hop routing
Both record that an item arrived. Only one of them can tell you what happened next.
| Logged once on arrival | With Traizr |
|---|---|
| The record ends at the front desk | Every leg recorded to the final handover |
| A new entry at each site | One record for the whole journey |
| Nobody owns it in transit | A named person accountable for every leg |
| Current location unknown | Where it is and who has it, on the dashboard |
| Stalled items look like new ones | Anything sitting too long is flagged |
| Redirects overwrite the history | The original leg stays on the record |
| Delays measured end to end | Time per leg, so the slow hop is identifiable |
| Cross-site journeys go dark | The same visibility across sites and countries |
Routing is only as good as your locations
The honest caveat on this page is that routing depends on two things being correct: your locations, and where your people sit within them. Get those wrong and an item is routed confidently to the wrong floor. That is worse than not routing it at all, because now everybody believes the system.
This is why the recipient list matters more than any routing feature. Someone changed department in November, a student moved rooms in week three, an entire team relocated to the second floor over a weekend. Each of those becomes a mis-routed item unless the list keeps up, and a list maintained by hand never quite does.
Traizr reads people and their locations from the system you already maintain, on a schedule, so routing follows reality rather than a spreadsheet exported last month. Lists can also be imported by CSV, brought in over SFTP or pulled through the API. All connectors are read-only: Traizr reads what it needs and never writes back. See the full list of integrations for what is available today.
Frequently asked questions
What is multi-hop mail routing?
It is the ability to send an item onward more than once without starting a new record each time. An item arrives at a central postroom, goes to a building, then to a department, then to a person. Each of those is a hop. Multi-hop routing means the item carries its destination and its history with it the whole way, so at any point you can see where it is, where it is going and who is holding it.
How is this different from tracking an item?
Tracking tells you where something has been. Routing decides where it goes next. In practice they are two halves of the same record: the route is the plan and the tracking is what actually happened. If your question is about proof and custody rather than movement, internal package tracking software is the page you want.
Does somebody have to plan the route in advance?
Not usually, and this is where people expect more complexity than there is. In most cases the recipient's location already implies the route, so scanning the item in is enough. Routes are only set explicitly when the destination is not obvious from the recipient, which tends to mean central intake operations and anything crossing between sites.
Who is accountable for an item mid-journey?
Whoever accepted the current leg. That is the point of recording handovers rather than movements. At any moment one named person is responsible, and responsibility transfers the moment they hand it on and it is scanned. It removes the situation where an item sits between two teams and belongs to neither.
Can items move between buildings and sites?
Yes, and between campuses and countries. A hop behaves the same way whether it crosses a corridor or a border. Everything stays on one record instead of being re-entered at each site, which is what usually breaks when an organisation runs a separate system per location.
What happens if the recipient has moved?
The item is redirected to their new location, and the redirect is added to the journey rather than replacing it. That matters afterwards, because "it went to the old office first" is often the explanation for a delay somebody is asking about.
Can we see items that are stuck?
Yes, and this is what most operations want from routing. An item that has been sitting on the same leg for longer than it should shows up as exactly that, so you can find it before the recipient asks where it is.
What if a leg is missed or scanned out of order?
The record shows what was scanned, in the order it happened. A missing hop appears as a gap rather than being smoothed over. That is the honest behaviour even though it is the less flattering one, and a gap is useful information: it tells you which handover point needs attention.
Does this work on a closed network?
Yes. Routing does not depend on an outbound connection, so it behaves the same way on an on-premise deployment. See on-premise mailroom software if that is your situation.
How many hops can an item have?
There is no fixed limit. Most items take two or three. The ones that take seven are the journeys worth having a record of, because those are where things go wrong and nobody can explain why afterwards.
Prefer to watch it? The multihop video follows an item across several sites in under a minute, and our guide to internal parcel tracking systems covers how to run a selection process.
Other things the platform does
Same system, different capability. Routing is one part of what happens to an item after it arrives.
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Virtual office software
Run a virtual office or business centre address: photograph every item, act on client instructions, and bill for what you handled.
Read the page -
Multi-tenant mailroom software
Many tenants on one platform, each seeing only their own mail, with a superadmin that creates and configures all of them.
Read the page -
On-premise mailroom software
Install on your own infrastructure or in a container inside your network, and run the mailroom with no outbound connection at all.
Read the page -
In-app support from real people
Ask a question from inside the product and get an answer from someone who knows it, not a ticket number and a queue.
Read the page
Ready to Simplify Secure Speed Up Optimise Your Building?
Describe the longest journey an item takes in your organisation and we will walk it hop by hop, so you can see where the record currently stops. About 20 minutes.