Oh, hey! Welcome to the community!

It’s back-to-school season for many institutions, which means students will be filling the residence halls and their packages will be filling the mail rooms. With plenty of orders on the way, some institutions might find themselves overwhelmed with package management. I reached out to Jeremy Alexander, Associate Director for Administration at Eastern Illinois University, to learn more about their approach to logging packages. 

We’d like to thank Jeremy for sharing his experiences with our community.

University Housing and Dining Services at Eastern Illinois University

Eastern Illinois University (EIU) is a regional comprehensive University founded in 1895.  EIU is situated on a 320-acre campus in Charleston, Illinois, and offers Bachelor’s, Master’s and Specialist’s degrees.  The University Housing and Dining Services (UHDS) department at EIU operates 11 residence halls, Greek Court, and 2 Apartment Complexes, each with a front desk including mail and package services. 

The Problem

UHDS previously used an all-paper process to notify a resident that they had a package requiring pick up at their area front desk.  The resident was notified of having a package with a paper slip in their mailbox, and the front desk staff recorded the receipt and pick-up of packages in a package log binder.  

This manual system presented several difficulties.  First, because the building rosters were printed, they weren’t always updated even if they were printed frequently.  Additionally, though the binders allowed each area to keep track of the packages at their desk, many times the main office or another area got called about a package at other front desks and then had to call the various areas to follow up on the status of a package.  Finally, inconsistencies were found in the package logging processes at each desk related to how the staff were logging or releasing the packages to residents.  

UHDS looked at some purpose-built package management systems, but they were cost-prohibitive for our operation so we turned to eRezLife Software for a solution.

The Solution 

Using the Residence Life service in eRezLife, EIU built a customized process for logging packages and notifying residents electronically.   

As we worked to streamline the process and ensure more thorough and accessible record keeping, we adopted the process outlined below:  

Managing package logs through eRezLife allowed us to record packages received at all of our facilities and easily notify the resident of the package receipt and pick-up location.  

The Result

We piloted the process over six months across one residence hall, Greek Court, and an apartment complex, continuing to refine the process and communication.  We adjusted our internal package process where a resident is now asked to pick up their package at the specific desk where the package was delivered. 

UHDS learned some valuable lessons that addressed their concerns from the manual process. First and foremost, we were able to enhance the accuracy of our mail process. Even in instances where a resident moved or misaddressed their packages, we were able to verify their current housing assignment through the same system in which we were logging packages, which made it easier to locate these students and their appropriate package pick-up location. eRezLife helped our process become more accurate, efficient, and consistent across campus. The centralized process enabled each area office to log packages in the same way, track packages no matter their location on campus, and follow the same guidelines for releasing the packages to residents. An unintended benefit of moving the process to eRezLife is the software’s use of form numbers, which provided us with a unique identifying code that could be used as label packages at the desks. With eRezLife’s recent release of the new conditional questioning features, we’re looking at how to use form logic to refine our package log process further. 

Want More Information?

If you’re interested in learning how you might implement package logs on your campus, please reach out to service@erezlife.com so we can help. We’d also be happy to work with you on building out processes that you’d like to streamline and digitalize!

Tags: community, highered, ResEd, Residence Life, staff selection