How WPS empowered staff and simplified delivery workflows with PackageX

The Worcester Public Schools is an organization that operates within the Worcester school district in Massachusetts and manages a collection of 44 schools including elementary, middle, and high school.

In order to help their students achieve academic excellence, the organization relies on deliveries to provide curriculum materials, teacher and student guides, electronic devices (computers, headphones, and tablets) and school supplies.

• —Worcester Public Schools have reduced lost packages to almost zero and now process packages in seconds (over 3000 annually).
• —Immediate email notifications have made recipient pickup less than a 24-hour process, with no reminders needed.
• —Recipients act quicker when retrieving packages, leading to dramatic space savings for Worcester’s limited storage area.

Worcester Public Schools is an organization that operates within the Worcester school district in Massachusetts and manages a collection of 44 schools between elementary, middle and high school. Between their schools, they foster 25,415 students from kindergarten to the twelfth grade.

In order to help their students, achieve academic excellence, the organization relies on deliveries to provide curriculum materials, teacher and student guides, electronic devices (computers, headphones, and tablets) and school supplies.

However, Worcester Public Schools’ tracking systems was outdated and used paper logs to keep records of incoming packages from national carriers. The issues they have experienced with this tracking method are numerous: tracking numbers were never fully or clearly written on logs, notifications weren’t uniformly sent and staff would have to consistently call or email with varying degrees of success and, most of all, they weren’t able to keep track of communication.

Even reading delivery logs was a tedious task, as Paul Melo, Document & Software Support Specialist at Worcester, puts it, “Looking up to see if and when a shipment was received, or picked up by the recipient was difficult and time consuming.” Questions such as who had actually picked up packages loomed over the receiving department, as not all tracking numbers were always written with deliveries with multiple packages.

After consistent lack of visibility into their package deliveries, Worcester Public Schools decided they needed a more effective solution to track and process deliveries.

Once Worcester Public Schools started using PackageX Receive, the software had an immediate impact on how the organization tracked, received, and processed packages.

Firstly, PackageX Receive saved staff time by eliminating the process of manually writing package logs through its optical character recognition (OCR) smart device scanning capabilities and, with its expert tracking, reduced lost packages to zero. Prior to PackageX Receive, Mr. Melo said, “The old process was time-consuming, and at times we would have multiple people from various departments searching areas of the building for potentially missing packages.”

PackageX Receive was also able to help Worcester solve some of its more unique challenges. Due to COVID-19, packages began arriving to the attention of the school name rather than select people or departments.

This is where our advanced software gave the organization the ability to add alternate receiving names and the ability to assign deliveries to their correct receiving departments by simply adding the name, nickname or abbreviation of the receiving member from its dashboard or mobile app flow. Ever since, one receiving member has been able to receive deliveries for an entire department, simplifying the package receiving process even further.

• —PackageX Receive’s tracking capabilities reduced lost packages to almost zero.
• —Recipients instantly see delivery notifications on their email & phone.
• —Recipients pickup packages faster, creating more storage space.

Problem summary

• —Struggling to find deliveries
• —Needed a method for consistent notifications & tracking
• —Limited space in storage area for increasing amounts of packages

Solution summary

• —PackageX Receive’s tracking capabilities keep records on package labels.
• —PackageX Receive uses automated email notifications and tracks sent notifications.
• —Operators send notifications instantly.

It only took Worcester a few weeks to stabilize their mail and package receiving process. Using PackageX Receive, WPS has been able to cut down their notification time from days to less than 5 hours per delivery.

That’s not the only way PackageX Receive notifications have made an impact. Immediate notifications have also led to more space savings. Mr. Melo attests, “We have a limited amount of physical space to hold packages. The immediate email notification appears to get people to act quicker when retrieving their package. There are also automatic reminder notifications, but people have picked up their packages within a 24 hour period, so reminders have not been needed.”

With faster package retrieval, higher visibility into deliveries and all of the space reclaimed in its inbound receiving workflow, Worcester Public Schools now easily processes over 3,000 packages annually.

Thank you to Paul Melo and the Worcester Public Schools’ team for your feedback and help making PackageX Receive even stronger and smarter. For help getting your operations up to speed, email sales@packagex.io or schedule a demo to see our software in action.