In the midst of the giving season, and with the end of the year close upon us, it seems a good time to reflect on the results of our corporate philanthropy efforts in 2019. With 22,000 employees in 23 countries, Exela has the wingspan with which to support philanthropic initiatives that touch communities across the globe. That’s why we created #ExelaGivesBack, a program through which Exela matches employee charitable donations dollar for dollar with regard to charities we hand-pick because they align with our values, which include:

• Respect for the Individual
• Ethics
• Collaboration
• Passion
• Innovation
• Empowerment

For example, our corporate philanthropy efforts raised $27,000 for the Center for Early Diagnostics and Therapy of Children with Hearing Impairments (“Children’s House”) in Zvezdara, a municipality in Belgrade, Serbia. We couldn’t have been more proud of our employees’ tireless efforts an dedication when, on August 28, 2019, we presented Children’s House with a new audiometer and typanometer, among other items of medical equipment that were desperately needed so that Children’s House can continue its good works. Half of the money raised for Children’s House came through employee donations.

In yet another outstanding showing of corporate philanthropy, Exela raised 22,630 for the American Cancer Society in connection with the ACS Relay for Life event that took place at the Rockcastle County Middle School in Mount Vernon, Kentucky on June 19, 2019. This amount reflects an impressive $12,630 raised by Exela employees—plus $10,000 contributed by Exela, which had pledged to match all employee donations up to $10,000.

The generosity of our employees goes beyond the fiscal, however. Every single one of Exela’s 639 full-time employees located in Exela’s Mount Vernon, Kentucky and London, Kentucky workplaces contributed to the Relay for Life effort in some capacity, whether by directly soliciting donations, selling raffle tickets, walking the track, or cheering on and otherwise supporting those walking.

Our other philanthropic efforts this year have included:

• Bare Hands Initiative
• Relay For Life
• Pacific Palisades Turkey Trot

You can read more about the Exela Gives Back Program here. And please stay tuned for 2020. We’ve got some exciting initiatives planned that we can’t wait to tell you about.

It’s September, and that means that from coast to coast, students are streaming back into universities by the thousands. Along with them, will be an even larger amount of mail pieces. However, the type of mail pieces pervasive on college and university campuses these days are not akin to what mailrooms were dealing with 15, 10, or even 5 years prior. While the use of traditional mail has waned, the prominence of packages – due to online shopping and textbook rental services – has skyrocketed. 

This, and other trends relating to the way that students are using mail are putting pressures on collegiate mail operations; waiting times are growing, undelivered mail pieces are becoming more frequent, and oftentimes, students are not checking their individual, lockable mailboxes a single time throughout the year. 

This is leading to a number of questions that campus mail managers are asking themselves such as; how can current workflows be updated to better suit today’s generation of digitally-savvy students? How can we better apply technology to the process? And how can we meet the high demands of students and their families, while respecting the resources of the institution? These challenges are also presenting an opportunity, to transition from a mail room to a true mail service center. 

Below, we’ll break down several evolving issues that are putting pressure on university mailrooms, and propose solutions that savvy mail managers are implementing.

Challenges

Increased Volume of Packages – One of the major trends adversely affecting the operating abilities of collegiate mailrooms is the rapidly increasing volumes of packages on college campuses. The number of packages being sent to college students has actually increased by 15% annually in recent years, outpacing the support systems that universities have in place to get these packages into the hands of their recipients. This has led to massive increases in terms of waiting times that students experience when they go to pick up packages, a problem which compounds itself as more and more packages go undelivered; taking up valuable mailroom real estate as well. 

Decreased Volume of Traditional Mail –While the amount of packages being sent to college students has grown exponentially in recent years, the amount of traditional mail being sent has trended in the opposite direction. This poses a large scale problem for university mailrooms, which are constructed from the ground up, literally, to deal with the opposite trends. Much of the real estate of a university mailroom is dedicated to individual, locked mail boxes assigned to each student, but recent studies have shown that many of these individual mailboxes go unused for a year or longer. 

Missed Deliveries, Long Waiting Times – While smaller mail pieces can be placed into the above-described mailboxes, at a traditional collegiate mailroom operation, packages are delivered by hand. Students are notified that they have a package, and come to pick it up from a mailroom worker. This was a fine strategy in the past, but because of the exponential growth of packages, lines are growing longer, and students are becoming increasingly frustrated with the experience. As of recently, peak wait times at major universities have surpassed the 30 minute mark. 

Solutions

Package Tracking Apps – The main reason why university mailrooms employ the above-described delivery methods (hand delivery from the mailroom) is so that the chain of custody is managed through all points. However, there are now technologies that can provide that information. With a package tracking app, stakeholders can track the collection of data from pickup to delivery without manually logging data. This function helps decrease the probability of losing packages and enables quicker communication at all stages of shipment and delivery. Data can also be posted on a secure website, as one way of notifying recipients when they have a package. When this type of tracking technology is combined with an Intelligent Locker delivery system, the need for mailroom personnel to physically hand a student’s package to them is done away with, automating hours of labor in the process. 

Intelligent Lockers – Intelligent Mail Lockers are innovative in a number of ways. First off, they are not individually assigned. For instance, students are notified via email or text message that they have a package. In that notification, the student is given the location of the locker and a one-time-use code they can use to open it. This reduces a number of pain points for a mail operation. It eliminates missed deliveries, long waiting times, and students rushing to the mailroom before it closes. It saves huge amounts of real estate; as the lockers are not individually assigned as traditional mailboxes are. Transitioning from small, individually assigned lockers to larger, shared ones can alleviate a number of issues for university mailrooms. 

Utilizing Mail Data & Metrics – Gaining insights into workflows, peak pickup times, and more are essential for mailroom managers attempting to streamline and modernize their operations. Fortunately, there are apps that can provide that information now. For example, there are digital dashboards that mailroom managers can use to establish KPIs, build custom reporting templates, and access historical data so that they can measure their current performance, and any changes they make to their processes or workflows, like the integration of Intelligent Lockers. 

The challenges facing college and university mailroom managers are unlike anything we have seen in the past, and the pain points are becoming more difficult to deal with every year. However, there are now more technology-based solutions in place to help manage these processes than ever before. Going forward, the successful mailrooms will be the ones that integrate these technologies in a savvy and timely fashion.

When it comes to package logistics and delivery, the ‘last mile’ is a metaphor used to describe the movement of goods from a centralized fulfillment center to their final destination.  Last-mile delivery is what happens after a package is dropped at reception, yet still needs to make it to the employee who ordered it. Or, when a package is delivered to a university mail center, yet still must be handed off to the student who ordered it.

Further complicating the last-mile delivery issue is that as eCommerce becomes more ubiquitous, the amounts of packages people receive at their universities, offices, or homes will continue to grow substantially. This has overwhelmed traditional last mile delivery strategies, where a shipping company like UPS delivers packages to a central location like a mailroom or the front desk. Enterprises, universities, and in many cases, logistics companies themselves are beginning to explore drastically different approaches to this last mile of package delivery.

While a variety of approaches are being tested, one of the most effective and straightforward so far has proven to be the implementation of intelligent lockers. Intelligent lockers, also sometimes referred to as intelligent parcel or mail lockers, are a scalable, customizable electronic locker systems that give both your on-site workers and office visitors alike an on-demand, secure space of their own which can be assigned daily as-needed based on requests for storage. As mobile workers without a permanent workplace become more prominent, another benefit of intelligent lockers emerges – they provide a storage option for mobile office workers and visitors.

Intelligent lockers not only cut through last-mile package delivery logistics – but they also simplify other emerging office management trends, like that of the mobile worker.

Here are two huge ways implementing intelligent lockers can streamline operations and logistics for enterprises:

    1. Streamlines Last Mile Logistics Substantially

There is a myriad of ways that implementing intelligent lockers in your corporate or university setting streamlines last-mile package delivery logistics. They preemptively and substantially reduce the amount of labor and time that is needed to deliver packages. When a recipient’s package is securely stored for them in a locker, they can pick it up with an emailed or texted code, at their leisure. Mailroom associates don’t need to chase down your employees who are on the receiving end of inbound communications, and undelivered packages don’t compile in a single, centralized area.

With intelligent lockers, there’s no need for a signature, because only the package recipient has the current code to the locker that contains their package. This helps to keep the chain of custody controlled. Once it’s claimed, the locker resets with a new code, and the process can begin again. Beyond that, the convenient way employees or students can now claim packages means you’ll likely see a decrease in the volume of calls to, or complaints about your mail center, meaning intelligent lockers can improve your customer satisfaction. Intelligent lockers can be custom-finished to reflect your enterprise or university branding, and many even come with expiration date capabilities – meaning if a package goes unclaimed it may be removed from the locker and handled appropriately by mailroom personnel.

As package delivery rates rise by as much as 25-100% per day, traditional delivery strategies become obsolete. But with elegant, straightforward delivery strategies such as intelligent lockers, mail center managers are far from powerless in terms of managing these new inbound mail and package trends.

They’re useful for outbound packages as well. Placed near a business entrance or at reception, they can act as a secure storage center for packages waiting to be picked up on the outbound side by a parcel delivery service. Simply pass along the password to the postal worker as needed.

The usefulness of intelligent lockers is not strictly contained within the area of package delivery. As the number of mobile workers increases, and modern, flexible office management trends like hoteling gain steam – a whole host of alternative uses for intelligent lockers emerges.

    2. Intelligent Lockers Aid in Modern Office Management/Hoteling

Constant connectivity has fundamentally changed the nature of how we work. On any given workday at large corporations, nearly 50% of dedicated work stations could be empty. The rise of the mobile workforce is great for business in many ways, but it also means that enterprises must adapt to meet the evolving demands of mobile employees and important guests coming and going.

As businesses seek to accommodate this growing mobile work force, they are turning to a trend called hoteling. A trend that’s emerged as a response to this growing mobile workforce, hoteling is reducing office-related costs by eliminating assigned workspaces for mobile workers and providing them with unassigned workspaces. However, when in the office, these workers need a secure space to store their belongings. Enter, intelligent lockers.

Whether it’s on-the-go mobile workers that need a secure place to store their belongings, or a set of employees without assigned desks that still need a way to receive inbound communications – intelligent lockers can help alleviate these pain points.

With intelligent lockers, everyone in your office – whether that is an employee from another site in for the day, or an overworked mail center struggling to track down employees who do not have an assigned workspace – can have a safe, easily accessible place to store their belongings, or pick up their mail, while easing the strain on your mail center personnel at the same time. You can even permanently assign intelligent lockers for frequent, high profile visitors. But no matter how you approach it, intelligent lockers are a logical, effective response to several difficult-to-adapt-to workplace trends – namely, increasing package volumes, and more mobile workers.

Due to increasing package volumes, and the proliferation of the mobile worker – enterprises and universities alike are dealing with various office and communications management issues that they have not had to confront before. But as solutions like intelligent lockers emerge, it’s becoming increasingly clear that stakeholders will have the tools they need to address these evolving trends.