American universities have tapped Australian smart locker company, TZ SMArt Lockers (ASX: TZL), to provide storage solutions to reduce the number of students waiting in tightly-packed queues to collect packages.

Cedarville University, in southwest Ohio, has become the latest in a growing number of US-based universities, to use the Australian company’s technology to manage the distribution of student’s parcels.

“When COVID hit, all of a sudden social distancing and the lines that are a part of the postal operation became a glaring problem,” Cedarville University director of retail services, Tammy Slone, told print and graphic art technology industry magazine In-Plant Impressions.

Ms Slone admitted students were sometimes forced to wait as long as 30 minutes to collect their parcels – with as many as 1,200 packages arriving each day.

Then in August last year Ms Slone was tasked with implementing a smart locker system before Christmas, in order to alleviate these problems.

TZ SMArt Lockers were brought on in September, and by the end of the year the university had removed roughly 2700 mail boxes to make way for 392 new metal lockers and 220 metal mailboxes.

Mail boxes are being used less frequently by students, with only 300 – 500 pieces of mail arriving each day, Ms Slone said, so rather than assigning each student their own individual mailbox the new boxes will be assigned to a student when mail arrives, then re-used for another student following collection.

Because the same boxes can now be used by multiple students, Cedarville University was able to reduce their mailbox count from 4000 to only 220.

This also freed up space for the university to install new printing equipment, with the added benefit that external clients looking to get short-run print jobs done through the university can also collect their prints from the smart locker system.

TZ has also provided smart locker systems to Clemson University, University of Phoenix and Columbia University.

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Sources:

• Cedarville University, Living in Southwest Ohio
• In-Plant Impressions, About Us
• In-Plant Impressions, Smart Lockers Come to Cedarville University
• TZ SMArt Lockers, Summer 2019 University installations