Providence, Rhode Island-based Providence College recently gave a technology makeover to the system used to get important packages to and from faculty and students.

The resulting improvements in efficiency and accountability are getting high marks. And that’s particularly important for a mail services department with limited resources - two full-time employees and one part-time employee, plus work-study students.

Providence College now uses UPS CampusShip™ to allow faculty and staff to easily process shipments from their computer desktops, and UPS Trackpad®, a parcel tracking and management system that it integrated with its internal system to process inbound shipments faster and more efficiently.

That means no more hand-written labels and trips to the mailroom by faculty, who can now easily process - and track - their shipments from their desktops, said Mark S. McGovern, director of central purchasing and receiving.

“And my staff doesn’t get questions about ‘has my package gone out yet?’ or ‘when’s it going to get there?’” McGovern said. “Now that information is readily available to them on their computer screen.”

CampusShip also replaced a time-intensive process of reconciling shipping charges to 85 different departments at the end of the month, in which an administrator compared hand-written slips of paper with shipping bills from various companies. Now Providence gets one monthly bill and an electronically generated report, making reconciliation a snap. McGovern said the time savings have been “huge.”

UPS Trackpad also has added efficiency and accountability to Providence’s system for getting packages in the hands of its 3,800 students. Providence receives 200 to 600 packages a day for students, a number that spikes around exam times.

In the previous system, when the college received a package for one of its 3,800 students, a student worker wrote out a notification card and placed it in the student’s on-campus mailbox. Pickups were subject to students checking their mailboxes, and occasionally notification cards were misplaced in the wrong mailboxes, or the wrong mailbox number was written on a card.

“When UPS came out and dropped off 400 packages, I had no accountability, once those packages got into our facility, to say I actually received them,” McGovern said. “What I said to UPS was that I wanted a system that has the ability to track a package once it reaches here.”

Now, when Providence’s mailroom receives a delivery, the student workers scan the packages with a Trackpad handheld unit, logging the delivery into a database. And because it’s integrated with the college’s internal system, the unit displays the recipient student’s name and mailbox number for confirmation. After scanning in all the day’s deliveries, Trackpad automatically sends e-mails to recipients notifying them they have a package waiting. Pickups also are entered into the database.

McGovern said many of the items sent to students - things like medication, airline tickets, or checks - are important and time sensitive. The combination of CampusShip and Trackpad not only makes the delivery system more efficient, it also adds accountability by allowing the college to immediately, and definitively, determine if it received an item, and if it was delivered.

Consequently, the college now has a digital record of what packages come in each day, and what packages are picked up or delivered. If any questions about packages arise, staffers can simply check the database. McGovern said that ability already “has solved multiple problems.”

“I’m building accounting mechanisms that are faster and more accurate,” McGovern said. “I’m delivering packages to kids and the college community at large faster and more proficiently. And we’re doing things that show the college community that we’re cutting edge, and we’re doing the right things to take care of their packages.”