Odense Kommune
Odense Kommune’s use of Parcel Pending by Quadient lockers delivers significant time and cost savings, plus positive environmental impact
Odense Kommune is a municipality in southern Denmark, located on the island of Funen, southwest of Copenhagen. It is the fourth-largest municipality in the country, with a population of over 200,000. The city of Odense is perhaps best known as the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen, the author of famous fairy tales such as “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, “The Little Mermaid”, and “The Princess and the Pea”.
| Challenge | Solution | Results |
|---|---|---|
| Odense Kommune’s IT department felt they were spending too much time driving through the city to various locations to pick up and drop off equipment, causing long delivery times, bottlenecks onsite, and delays in resolving IT issues. | Odense Kommune determined that parcel lockers were what they needed to improve their equipment delivery process and selected Parcel Pending by Quadient as the best solution to meet their needs. | By delivering to just a handful of parcel locker locations, equipment deliveries now take 10 minutes instead of 80, resulting in almost 1,000 hours of time savings and over US$50,000 (355,000 DKK) in labor cost savings each year for the Odense Kommune IT team. Employees now experience fast and flexible delivery of their equipment through parcel lockers that are easily accessible and centrally located. With 1650 deliveries facilitated using the parcel lockers over the most recent six months, the municipality is also improving its carbon footprint and taking one step closer to being climate neutral by 2030. |
Forward-thinking, always improving
Odense Kommune employs 14,000 people that provide public services for the municipality such as care for the elderly as well as library, education, healthcare, and transportation services, among many others. The IT department, a small team of 6, supports the IT needs for the entire municipality’s workforce, including delivering equipment to employees.
The IT team felt they were spending too much time driving through the city to various locations to pick up and drop off equipment. This process created long delivery times as it could take up to a week to get equipment out, and also created bottlenecks onsite when too many employees needed to pick up their items at the same time. This also caused delays in resolving IT issues as the team had to spend a considerable part of their working hours on equipment delivery. When the pandemic hit and employees started working from home, it became even more challenging to meet with IT for pick-ups.
Odense Kommune’s Support and Logistics team, which continuously seeks to improve ways of doing business to empower employees, recognized the need for a better process for equipment delivery, and wondered if parcel lockers could be a solution to the problem. Following an online search of the possibilities and various parcel locker providers, Mads Holmstrøm, Support and Logistics Team Manager for Odense Kommune, selected Parcel Pending by Quadient as the best solution to meet their needs.
Saving time, costs, and the environment
Odense Kommune chose five locations and installed 25 locker boxes of varying sizes at each one, with two more locations in plan. The parcel lockers have been well received, both by IT staff and other Odense Kommune employees.
| “The new lockers worked from the day of installation, with only minor corrections from time to time, which were resolved quickly. With the new parcel lockers, very little support is needed and that has worked really well. The lockers are also fully integrated with ServiceNow, our third-party platform for managing IT operational incidents, so managing the workflow is smooth.” |
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| Mads Holmstrøm, Support and Logistics Team Manager, Odense Kommune |
The equipment delivery process for the IT team now saves significant time and costs. Previously, driving to multiple locations to deliver equipment took 80 minutes. Now, it takes just 10 minutes to load equipment into lockers that are located in the offices where IT staff is already stationed. Should the need arise, only one employee is required to drive around filling the parcel lockers with IT equipment and emptying returned equipment. This is equivalent to savings of almost 1,000 hours and over US$50,000 (355,000 DKK) in labor costs a year.
Employees now also experience fast and flexible delivery of their equipment because they can easily access the lockers which are placed centrally in the city of Odense. “In the beginning, it was optional for employees to collect deliveries from a parcel locker, but now, the IT department has control over which equipment to be delivered to the lockers. As a result, employees get their IT equipment delivered much faster and they can choose which locker to pick up from, so this offers a great deal of flexibility,” said Holmstrøm.
With 1650 deliveries carried out through the parcel lockers over the most recent six months, the municipality is also realizing other benefits that are making an impact on an initiative that Odense Kommune has an eye on—climate action. Fewer car trips not only save employees from aggravation should pick up plans change, but also reduces the amount of CO2 emissions, thereby improving Odense Kommune’s carbon footprint and taking the municipality one step closer to being climate neutral by 2030, a goal adopted unanimously by the city council in 2020.
| “Parcel Pending is a flexible parcel locker solution, and being able to integrate easily with our other systems, such as ServiceNow, was crucial. For the end user – our users, who are not technical – it is simple to operate and needs only little instruction. In addition to equipping more locations with parcel lockers, we are also looking to see if there are other uses outside of IT. Parcel Pending provides good and quick support, and is responsive to our wishes and requests for adjustments. We definitely highly recommend them!” |
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| Mads Holmstrøm, Support and Logistics Team Manager, Odense Kommune |
Quadient is the leading provider of innovative package management solutions for commercial properties worldwide. With over 70 million packages delivered annually, Parcel Pending by Quadient offers a wide range of solutions that ensure simple, secure, and seamless asset exchanges and employee package retrieval.
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