Many large organizations, like municipalities or large companies, still use internal mail delivery service to send documents between departments.
The digitalization of operational processes using more e-mail, digital signature solutions, and files on servers is slowly replacing paper. With this, it is a given that the number of interdepartmental deliveries is decreasing in volume. But it may take some years before it becomes completely inter-envelope-free. And we sometimes need to have analog backup routines for legal reasons.
Internal Mail Delivery Service
The mailroom staff handles these physical pick-ups and deliveries. They walk, bike, or drive around to the organization’s many post boxes, often distributed over a large geographical area, like the whole city, typically according to a schedule.
In, for instance, a larger Swedish municipality, there may be over 500 mailboxes to empty. Even in medium-sized cities, there are easily 100-200 mailboxes. Consequently, when the number of analog envelopes decreases, the number of empty pick-up runs increases. The staff will still have to check the outboxes every time according to the schedule, even if they are empty.
About 30-40% of the mailboxes might turn up empty, except for a couple of times a year.
All municipalities have different geographies and are of various sizes. Common is that most of the population lives in the urban areas. But then we have suburbs, villages, and smaller towns with local offices.
Improve efficiency
Sensative’s Yggio DiMS platform and Strips Presence sensors for LoRaWAN.
Installing a sensor that detects whether there is an internal envelope to pick up can be considered costly. However, if we estimate that 40% of the outboxes have internal envelopes once a year, this quickly makes economic sense, saving staff time and transportation costs, as well as shortening delivery times.
This picture shows a typical outbox in one of our customers’ offices. The Strips Presence sensor is mounted inside the outbox (“UTKORG”) and signals when someone places an envelope on top of it. It is then displayed on the Yggio dashboard for pick-up planning.
The sign still reads, “The outbox will be emptied every day at 13:30”, but this will soon be changed to something like “emptied according to SLA.” or similar. The internal mail service is also in the process of differentiating the pricing for different service levels, like “pick-up within an hour,” “before the end of the day,” and “no later than tomorrow night.”
Benefits
Digitalization means fewer documents sent this way, and scheduled delivery pick-up efficiency decreases when staff check outboxes, even if they are empty. Implementing IoT presence sensors means
- Pick-up only when needed improves efficiency and shortens delivery times.
- Delivery Service can differentiate charging based on service levels.
