Internal mail collection: from fixed rounds to routes
The volume of internal mail falls every year. The round does not. Collect only where there is something to collect.
The mail volume falls, but the round stays the same
Large organisations still move paper between departments. Municipalities, hospitals and large companies run an internal mail service, and although e-mail, digital signatures and shared file storage keep reducing the volume, it does not reach zero: some documents stay on paper for legal reasons, and an analogue fallback is kept on purpose.
Mailroom staff walk, cycle or drive to every outbox on a fixed schedule, whether or not anything is in it. As the envelopes disappear, the share of wasted stops climbs. The problem is not the mail. It is the journeys made to collect nothing.
A large municipality may have over 500 outboxes; a normal-sized one has 100 to 200, spread across the city centre, suburbs, villages and small local offices. On any given round, perhaps 30 to 40 % of them hold nothing, and some see an envelope only a couple of times a year, yet are visited on the same schedule as the busiest box in the building.
Strips Presence, in object detection mode
A sensor inside the outbox reports whether there is anything to collect. Strips Presence runs here in object detection mode rather than the presence mode it uses on a desk: the question is not whether a person is nearby, but whether something is lying in the box.
It sends a low-powered infrared pulse at each poll and measures how much light comes back. Above the configured threshold it reports an item; below half the threshold it reports the box empty. Both states are confirmed. The range is up to 50 cm and configurable, so it is tuned to the depth of the box rather than to a room.
The strip is 3 mm thin and mounts with adhesive under the lid or on the base, where an envelope lands. No power, no cabling, over ten years on its sealed battery, and LoRaWAN to reach the network. That is what makes 500 boxes across a municipality feasible rather than theoretical.
Two boxes waiting, eight empty: the round visits two
Each outbox lands in Yggio as an ordinary device, on a dashboard or a map with its current state, and the round is planned from the boxes that have something in them. The Rule Engine turns a reported box into an action: notify the mailroom, add a stop to today’s route, or escalate a box that has waited longer than the service level allows.
- Collection happens only where there is something to collect. The empty stops disappear from the route, which saves real staff time and vehicle distance.
- Deliveries also get faster. An envelope placed at 09:00 no longer waits for the 13:30 round.
- The far edges become affordable. A local office that sees an envelope twice a year is the worst stop on a fixed schedule and a trivial one on a demand-driven route.
From a fixed time to a service level
A fixed schedule can only promise a time: the sign on the box says it is emptied every day at 13:30, and that is the whole product. Once the service knows which boxes have something in them, it can promise a response instead, and price it: collection within the hour, before the end of the day, or by the following evening.
An internal service that was a fixed cost becomes one with service levels and differentiated charging. The sensors pay for themselves on avoided journeys; the pricing change is what makes the case comfortable.
It does
- Report that something is in the box
- Report within the configured interval, confirmed both ways
- Detect anything within its configured range
- Run for years with no power and no cabling
It does not
- Count the envelopes, or say how many
- Know what the item is, or how urgent it is
- See an envelope that lands outside its range
- Replace the round entirely, since some boxes still need a scheduled visit
The empty stops are the business case
The same pattern fits wherever a fixed round collects something that is only sometimes there. Waste and recycling are the obvious neighbours. The full use case in Sensative Docs.
- Take the round you already run and count the empty stops. The mailroom staff can usually tell you from memory.
- Instrument one route end to end, not a sample of boxes across several. A route is only shortened when every stop on it is known.
- Test placement in one box first: where the envelope lands, what the threshold needs to be, whether the lid changes the reflection.
- Decide the service level before the sensors arrive. What the service promises is what the deployment changes.
- Extend to the sparse edges next, not to the busiest buildings. The rarely used boxes are where a fixed schedule costs most.