Time to renew

Annual Renewal is the period during which some 15,000 faculty and staff renew their annual Transportation Services commute products: about 3,000 annual parking permits and about 12,000 U-PASS memberships. For the staff at the Transportation Sales & Administration (S&A) office on Campus Parkway, it’s a busy and rewarding time.

It all starts the first week of April with S&A reaching out to all 15,000 customers — more than 1,000 of whom won’t be reachable by email. Customers have until April 30 to renew their permits or U-PASSes online, a quick, simple process for most people. The staff then spends May tying up loose ends: ensuring parking violations get paid off before customers receive their permits, for example, and continuing efforts to contact hard-to-reach customers.

In June comes the scramble to distribute permits to customers before the new fiscal year begins in July. This is a much simpler process than it used to be, but it is still an all-encompassing task that must take place during a two-week window. Later in the month, hundreds of customers who didn’t renew their products online come to do it in person, making it the busiest time of year at Transportation Services’ front counter.

Annual Renewal is counted as a success for the S&A staff when the typical customer has no idea that all that work is going on behind the scenes. Ideally, most will renew online and be done in a matter of seconds, all set until Annual Renewal rolls back around next year. “The goal is for the customer to have a seamless transition,” said S&A Assistant Manager Jazmyne Green. “They shouldn’t have to know what we’re doing on the back end.”

To make that happen, the staff must quickly make its way through an enormous volume of work, with a high attention to detail — no one wants a wrench thrown into his or her daily commute. Thankfully, in recent years, S&A has streamlined the process in a number of ways.

The ORCA-powered U-PASS introduced in 2011 has eliminated the need to deliver stickers to U-PASS customers, many of which had to be matched to corresponding parking permits. And several years ago S&A began mailing parking permits directly to customers, doing away with a distribution system that went through payroll coordinators from departments throughout the University. (That improvement sprung from a staff Lean idea.)

“These improvements help the entire UW community,” said S&A Manager Kay Dumlao Doherty. The improved permit distribution process has saved other departments valuable time and work once spent delivering permits to their staff. Meanwhile, S&A staff used to spend about 70 percent of their time during the Annual Renewal period sorting and matching permits and doing other administrative tasks. Now they spend 70 percent of their time helping customers, thanks to efficiency improvements.

“Our ultimate goal is to make it easy for the customer,” Doherty said, and every year the staff sets a higher bar.