Stowe School Case Study

Background:

Stowe School was founded in 1923 and opened with 99 pupils. By 1935, the school had 500 pupils. Stowe House, home to the prestigious school, was built in 1683. The house, along with many other school buildings, belong to the National Trust. Today, the school has 800 pupils across 13 different boarding houses.

Each month, the mailroom receives over 2,000 pieces of signed for mail, including royal mail special deliveries and couriered mail including Amazon and ASOS parcels. Prior to the implementation of OmniPost, on receipt of mail, it was logged into a book, each recipient of mail was then manually notified that they had mail to collect. The mailroom would receive constant queries regarding deliveries and their whereabouts.

Challenges & Installation:

Helen Bagby, Head of Support Services at Stowe School, identified the volume of couriered mail was continually increasing. Helen wanted a solution to make tracking deliveries and notifying recipients a lot quicker, accurate and more efficient. Helen also required a means to search for historical information, and the mailroom wanted proof that the recipient had collected their respective items.

OmniPost was identified as the solution to managing incoming mail and notifying recipients of their delivery. OmniPost was selected due to its ease of implementation, a simple to configure web-hosted application, meaning that no installation was required onto the existing IT infrastructure.

Other factors in the selection of OmniPost were the ease in which automatic mail receipt notification get configured and sent, the quick search for historical information providing proof of collections, the filters/reports and most of all the ease of use, all of which completely removes any disputes over-delivered/collected mail.

OmniPost being a UK product, hosted and supported in the UK by an ISO27001 company was also a factor in its selection. On-site installation and training followed by unlimited telephone support (and on-site as required), made OmniPost a very low-risk investment.

Result:

The system has been in use at Stowe since November 2017. In the first three months, an average of 2,500 items had been processed each month. All items now have a full audit trail including the date/time the item was received and a record of who collected it, the time collected, and the recipient signature. In the event of a dispute, the mail team can email a POD that includes the full audit trail of the item.

Helen Bagby, Head of Support Services, said: “Since installing OmniPost it has improved the efficiency of the mailroom tremendously. No longer do we have to email each recipient one by one to tell them to come and collect their item. The system now sends this email for us, OmniPost also sends them a collection reminder if they have not collected their item within 24 hours.

“I would recommend OmniPost to any organisation looking at improving the service their mailroom is providing and looking to save time and increase the accuracy of records.”