What Mail and Receiving Leaders Told Us, Live, About Doing More With Less

In July 2026, I, Jesse Rosenbaum Solutions Engineer at FacilityOS, stood in front of a room of mail and receiving leaders at the NACUMS 2026 Conference, roughly 60 people representing more than 50 different higher education institutions, and made a claim I've believed for twelve years: technology should support a well-designed operation, not compensate for a poorly understood one.

Then something useful happened. The room didn't just nod along. They voted, live, through three quick polls, and the results tracked almost exactly with the argument I was making as I made it. This post is that talk, plus the data the room handed back to me.

The Landscape Hasn't changed. The pressure has.

Some of the numbers here aren't new. First-class mail is down roughly 51% since 2008. U.S. parcel volume is up 95% since 2015 and still climbing. Freshman enrollment jumped 5.5% in fall 2024, which is about 130,000 new students in a single year. None of that is a surprise to anyone running a campus mail operation.

What's changed is what those numbers mean for the people doing the work. Letter mail keeps shrinking while packages keep growing, and student expectations are shaped less by other universities and more by Amazon, DoorDash, and everything else people use every day. More volume, higher expectations, same headcount.

I asked the room a simple question: which part of your operation has changed the most over the last five years? Among those who voted, package volume won, ahead of physical space and technology, with staffing trailing behind.

That's not a surprising result on its own, but it's confirmation that the pressure isn't theoretical. It's the thing people are living with every day.

Operational Debt is Real, and It's Not a Technology Problem

Under pressure, teams optimize for speed at intake. That's the right instinct. But every skipped scan, uncaptured sender, or "I'll log that later" creates work for someone downstream. I call that operational debt, because like financial debt, it doesn't disappear. It gets paid later, usually by whoever answers the "where is my package" call.

That inquiry burden is bigger than most teams realize. UC Davis consolidated from 11 siloed systems to one platform and saw inquiry tickets drop 75%, not because they added staff, but because the data was already visible when the question came in.

Jessica Phillips, Mailroom Supervisor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, gave me one of my favorite examples of this while we were prepping for the talk. Two departments were sharing the same login in their package system. After staff turnover, nobody could tell which department had last touched an item. They didn't buy new software. They assigned separate usernames. Small change, real improvement in accountability.

Space tells the same story. Traditional mailboxes were built for letter mail that's shrinking, while parcels compete for the same square footage. Union College removed more than 2,300 mailboxes to reclaim space for packages, not because mailboxes were bad, but because the work had changed underneath them.

Where the Room Said They'd Actually Spend the Money

Here's where the poll results got interesting. I asked the room: if you had one improvement budget this year, where would it create the greatest impact?

That's a notable gap. Given a hypothetical budget, almost half the room reached straight for technology, the top of the three-tier framework I walk through in the talk: process standardization first, operational improvements second, technology investment third. The instinct to jump to the flashiest tier is exactly the mistake I warn against, and the poll shows how strong that pull is, even among people who'd just heard the counterargument.

Then I asked the harder question: what's the biggest barrier to improving your operation today?

Put those two results side by side and you get the real tension in the room. Most people want to start at the top of the pyramid, but three out of five say budget is the thing stopping them.

That's worth sitting with, because doing nothing is also a decision. It just has a different cost: staff time, missing visibility, and eroded trust. Improvement isn't all-or-nothing. It's a spectrum, and the question isn't whether you can afford to improve, it's where you start.

The spectrum runs from process changes that cost nothing but discipline, through operational adjustments that take some effort but little capital, up to technology that requires a real budget line. None of those tiers is the "right" answer on its own. The right one is whichever tier matches where your operation's biggest friction actually lives right now, and for most teams, that's further left than the poll results suggest.

That's exactly the case for starting at Tier 1: process standardization costs nothing but discipline, and it's the foundation that makes the Tier 3 technology investment actually pay off when the budget eventually shows up.

So let's make this practical. One of the biggest mistakes I see organizations make is feeling like they have to jump straight to the biggest project. I don't think that's how operational improvement works. I think it happens in stages.

Start where you are. Then let your results justify the next investment.

Measure It, or You Can't Defend It

I closed the talk with four metrics I'd encourage any team to start tracking, with nothing fancier than a spreadsheet: inquiry rate, pickup turnaround, exception rate, and space utilization. The goal isn't a perfect dashboard. It's a baseline you can point to when you're making the case for the next investment.

That's really the throughline here. The poll responses, 20 to 25 votes per question from a room of roughly 60 mail and receiving leaders, made the point better than I could have on slides alone: budget is real, the pull toward technology is real, and the operations that get the most out of that eventual technology investment are the ones that did the unglamorous process work first.

Everything above came from a room of higher education mail and central receiving leaders, and I want to keep that context attached rather than stretch their answers into a claim about every industry. But the framework itself isn't specific to campuses. Any organization handling mail, parcel, or freight in a receiving area, large or small, corporate, healthcare, government, or industrial, runs into the same shape of problem: volume keeps growing, budgets don't move with it, and the operations that handle that best are the ones that fixed their process before they bought their technology.

Technology should support a well-designed operation, not compensate for a poorly understood one. The room just proved it.