One for all: The UB-ZB Courier

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Ordered today, delivered tomorrow: The UB-ZB courier transports an average of 1,900 books per month back and forth between 23 UB locations and the ZB – that’s around 23,000 media per year. A small logistical masterpiece, as a visit to the UZH logistics center shows.

If the UB-ZB courier had a color, it would be blue. Because books ordered via courier make their way from one location of the university library to the other in bright blue boxes. Depending on the location, internal mail picks up the book boxes filled by the counter staff once or twice a day – and takes them on a journey across Zurich. First stop: the UZH logistics center.

This is located on the Irchel campus and covers several halls and rooms in the basement. From early in the morning until the evening, the center is bustling with activity. Thousands of letters, small and large parcels, but also general cargo such as refrigerators with chemical substances arrive here every day. The well-coordinated logistics team sorts, loads and finally transports them to the approximately 150 organizational units of the UZH.

The books ordered by courier from the UB and ZB also first land here in the logistics center, or more precisely in the “UB Hub”, the distribution center of the UB-ZB courier. Here, the blue boxes are piled up in rows, some of them lying open on a long table. Behind them stands logistics employee Sait Sahiti. “First we scan all the incoming boxes, and sort the books by destination,” he explains. “Then we repackage them, add a barcode to the boxes, get them ready for delivery, and hand them over to the driving service.”

Several employees then deliver the goods simultaneously to the various locations in Oerlikon, in the city center or at the animal hospital by van or by scooter. Deliveries for the UB Natural Sciences on the Irchel campus are transported on foot by handcart. They cover a total of around 65 kilometers per day.

How the courier came to be

The UB-ZB courier was launched in 2022 and has enjoyed great popularity ever since: users order an average of 85 books per day by courier to their libraries, sometimes more than a hundred during semesters. That’s a lot – but not enough to build a separate infrastructure for it. In addition, the volumes are very different: For example, at smaller locations such as the UB Anglistik, on average only 1 book per day is ordered by courier, while at the ZB it is 40 times more. The setup of this service was correspondingly complex.

“Providing an A Mail service between so many libraries, some of which are far apart, was a sticking point for us,” says Christian Winter, head of UZH logistics – he virtually invented the UB-ZB courier. The desire for a comprehensive courier service between the university libraries and the ZB had been there for some time, he says. “With the establishment of the new university library in 2022, it made sense for me to tackle this project together with the library managers.”

Creating a separate courier service just for the university library was never an option for him: “With the long distances, the constantly fluctuating and sometimes very small volumes, an autonomous courier would either be much too slow or too expensive – and in any case inefficient,” he says. To make the UB-ZB courier possible, Winter therefore relied on synergies with internal UZH mail. “The 23 locations to which the book courier is now connected, we drive to every day anyway,” Winter says. “So I set up the processes so that we could use these existing tours for the book courier as well.”

Setting up the UB-ZB courier has challenged Winter and the UB managers, but the results are impressive: Each day, about 12 logistics employees are involved in various steps of the book courier – but in total, the additional work volume is equivalent to only an 80 percent position. Not exactly enough to move 23,000 media per year by A Mail. So it’s all the more surprising that the courier service worked well right from the start: “Of course, we had to fine-tune the processes at the beginning and even now,” says Karin Brändli, who is responsible for the courier service at the UB, “but the courier works very well, and we’re happy to be able to offer our users such a service.”

Extra fitness for the logistics team

On the ramp of the logistics center, Jonathan Bossard heaves blue boxes into a delivery truck. Bossard has been working as a logistician at UZH for several years, and today he goes on “tour” with the internal mail. “When the book courier was newly started, everything was still a bit chaotic, but it has since settled in,” he says. “For us, in addition to some new work steps, the transport volume in particular has changed.” For example, deliveries to the institutes used to be limited to a few letters and parcels, but now the book boxes are added to the mix. “You notice that in the evening,” he says, laughing.

So the UB-ZB courier requires extra fitness on the part of the employees. Especially when they drive to the ZB: Around 80 percent of orders are placed by or to the ZB. The students and researchers at UZH can be happy about this, as it saves them many a kilometer of walking.

Text: Martina Kammermann, Kommunikation
Bilder: André Krysl, CC BY-NC UB Zürich