Universities issuing RFP’s for Locker systems is an increasingly efficient way for a University to obtain price quotes from Vendors. The RFP process also allows the University to place value on the non-financial items that are of importance to them. While price is a factor in the selection of the vendor, there are many other items that are important and each University will weigh these differently. Paying close attention to the RFP will help to identify what is the most important and help the vendor to provide the best possible response to the RFP.
Non-Cost related items include:
- Ability to wrap the lockers or brand them. It is not enough to provide a low-cost solution, some universities will want a wow factor too.
- Ability to utilize smart phone technology to access the lockers and or notify the students of a package. This continues to gain traction
- Ability to place letter mail or multiple packages for the same student in the locker
- Ability for the Locker system to utilize existing bar codes from shippers (i.e. UPS, Fed EX, USPS) to ingest packages into lockers
- Ability to receive tech updates without having to take down locker system or have vendor staff on-site
- Ability to track how long a package has been in a locker, how many lockers are open.
- Assigning packages to lockers based on package size (small, medium, large, x-large)
Universities may look for value added benefits also like the ability to have randomly stored letter mail folders for students. Understanding that package volume continues to rise and letter mail continues to drop is an important factor when looking at value added benefits. Being able to describe how additional lockers at other locations on campus can be added to the existing platform and do you have indoor and outdoor locker options available is critical.