Metafour and SKY Case Study

Sky is a British media and telecommunications conglomerate. Europe’s largest media company and pay TV broadcaster, they employ more than 31,000 employees in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. Their west London HQ is home to around 10,000 people who work in and around the company’s studios.

With such a large campus, the company’s mailroom operation is extremely busy and demanding. 3 members of a team of 13 are solely responsible for ensuring the 300-400 incoming packages received every day end up in the hands of the right people.

Sky were having issues with their old mailroom software. Their previous system was full of glitches and would often crash, losing jobs in the system. Visibility of the status of current shipments was also a concern for the mailroom. Items would sometimes simply disappear from the display, meaning that it could be difficult to track parcels over the extremely large site.

Although Sky had reservations about changing their software, the company began to look for alternative solutions. Their new software had to be easy-to-use, cheap, and hold as much information on their deliveries as possible. After looking at the market, they decided that Metafour’s software fulfilled all these criteria.

The implementation process was very straightforward, and Metafour’s software was soon in use across their London campus. Items delivered on site were now logged into the system, triggering automatic email notifications to the addressee. These parcels were then taken to either the main mailroom or mailroom kiosk, depending on the location of the recipient. MetApp, the mobile messenger app, allowed these movements to be made on the go, rather than being tethered to a deskbound system, creating a full chain of custody for every delivery with ease.

The in-depth track and trace available in the system was a huge benefit for the Sky mailroom team. By being able to quickly add all relevant tracking information, a full audit log of each delivery was easily accessible to every operative. The customer-facing staff in particular found that it helped to speed up query resolution when colleagues came to collect their goods.

Additionally, the customisable system helped the mailroom to improve their internal communications. By setting up rules to send out automatic notifications for various milestones, the operatives could ensure that colleagues were always informed of deliveries. They also had the added benefits of saving the team time by automating a resource-heavy process and allowing controllers to easily identify items overdue for collection by the recipient.

Due to the success of Osterley, two more Sky sites in Scotland now use Metafour’s software in their mailrooms. The system has enabled these teams to
establish seamless accountability throughout the delivery journey, streamline their operations, and greatly improve their user satisfaction.

Campus of around 10,000 people
300 – 400 incoming packages every day
3 sites now using the system