Innovating Student Stockout Requests

It’s rare for a campus store to be considered for an Innovation in Community College Award from the League for Innovation in the Community College, an organization that promotes and recognizes many types of innovative practices at its member colleges.

Most often the League’s awards go to faculty members or sometimes to administrators in areas such as admissions or financial aid. But Beth Mason developed a digital means for tracking out-of-stock book requests for the Johnson County Community College Bookstore that got the League’s attention.

“The nice thing about it is that any store needing a better way than paper to track these requests could easily recreate this project and scale for their needs,” said Mason, course materials supervisor for the store in Overland Park, KS.

When she joined the staff as a course materials buyer in August 2023, the store was using a large paper binder to record student requests for textbooks that were out of stock. Requests were filled out manually, with hundreds of sheets used each semester. There was no system for alerting when a new request had been submitted, binder sheets could be misplaced, and occasionally books were accidentally ordered twice.

“With the first thought that it would be great if all the buyers were alerted whenever a new request went into the binder, I worked backwards to make it happen with our current resources,” she said.

Using Microsoft Forms and SharePoint, Mason created a form to enable students to submit textbook requests online through a QR code. Each submission automatically generates an alert to the buying team for prompt response. The data is stored in a SharePoint spreadsheet with real-time updates and visibility by the entire team. The form provides a structured workflow for each request, showing its progress through different statuses: submitted, ordered, fulfilled. A trigger was also built into the program to move a completed order to a different tab, avoiding duplicate orders.

The result has been faster processing (with quicker delivery to students), fewer errors and lost requests, and improved collaboration between buyers and customer service staff, all of whom can access, update, and track orders from the shared system. The data collected on out-of-stock requests has also enabled the bookstore to identify issues and patterns with inventory access and purchasing and reduce stockouts in the future.

“From the buying team who will need to address the request and make sure something is already on order to the warehouse team who will need to know that these books have been requested and shouldn’t go to the sales floor, this process allows us to better support our students’ success at JCCC,” Mason noted. Going paperless was an added benefit.

The new process went into effect with the spring 2024 semester. After a year of testing, with some tweaks, the online form has gotten positive feedback from both students and customer service staff.

As a bonus, there was no cost to developing the form. All of the resources were already available in the store’s existing Microsoft applications and Mason is confident other campus stores could make their own form.

“Only simple triggers and automations have been used in the interest of being easy to replicate and manage at every experience level,” she said.