Right before Spring Break, Porter College students were notified that their mailroom would soon be run by robots. Well, that was a bit of an exaggeration. But the Porter College Mailroom is the site at which a pilot is being conducted to evaluate a third-party software/hardware combination intended to vastly improve the receipt, handling, and timely delivery of packages to students.
The number of packages sent to UCSC students at their college address has increased dramatically over the past several years. Whether delivered by USPS, UPS, FedEx or other carrier, our students – like many of us – shop online for books, supplies, technology, and more. Consequently, the mailrooms (one at each of UCSC’s ten colleges) are receiving a steadily increasing numbers of parcels. The descriptors used for the volume of packages that arrive in the first weeks of any academic quarter – avalanche, deluge, inundation – give a good sense of what our mailroom workers are up against.
So far, the system being piloted shows terrific promise.
Here’s how it works: When a truck delivers packages, the barcode on each shipping label is optically scanned, an inventory label is generated and attached to the package, the receipt of the package is quickly logged in via a simple web interface, an email is immediately and automatically sent to the student alerting of their package’s availability for pick-up, and then the student presents their ID for a swipe that simultaneously helps verify their identity while completing that particular package’s need to be tracked by the system. Compared to the largely manual process previously in place, the “robot” has cut the process time in half. A recent delivery of 177 packages would formerly have taken upwards of four hours to process, and that doesn’t include the sorting of regular mail and other functions performed by mailroom staff. With the new system, not only were these 177 packages processed in under two hours, all other functions were able to be completed during this time.
Tiffany Burns, whose duties include that of Mailroom Manager at Porter, indicates that other benefits of the pilot so far include: a “greener” operation as this is a nearly paperless system, a reduction in the number of simple but confusion-producing errors (e.g., putting the paper notification slip into the wrong mail box), easier access to historical records should any questions come up regarding a particular delivery, and, now that students are actively notified when a package has arrived (and are sent a daily email until that package is picked up), the accumulation of to-be-claimed packages – which was becoming a significant problem in the tight quarters of a high volume mailroom – is virtually non-existent.
The pilot will run for a week beyond the end of Spring Quarter 2014. If deemed worthwhile, this system will be installed at each college mailroom.
Most importantly, per Ms. Burns, “Students love it! Even those,” she quips, “who were disappointed to NOT find a robot in their mailroom.”
