A US university transformed high-volume IT loans and returns at scale.
Delivered with Velocity Smart Collect® running natively inside the university's ServiceNow platform — handling student and staff IT at scale.
Three customer-confirmed results.
Each measured by the customer against their own pre-Velocity baseline.
A US university.
A US university running high-volume IT operations across student and staff populations, with ServiceNow standardised for enterprise IT service management.
Where university IT runs into a high-volume returns ceiling.
University IT teams face a particular kind of structural pressure. The user population is large, transactional volume is high, and a meaningful share of devices is loaned rather than assigned — laptops on overnight loan, AV equipment for lectures, peripherals issued for project work. Each loan requires checkout, return tracking, and chase-up when items go missing.
Manual processes drown at this volume. IT staff time gets consumed by late-return chasing, lost-item investigation, and the administrative overhead of large transaction volumes. Student and staff experience suffers because the loaner process feels slow, opaque, and bureaucratic.
Why traditional loan-and-return systems struggle at scale.
Traditional approaches to university IT loans rely on staffed counters, paper sign-out sheets, or basic asset-tracking software. All three fail at scale for the same reason: they put a human in the critical path of every transaction. Staffed counters have fixed opening hours. Paper systems have no real-time visibility. Lightweight asset trackers don't close the loop with the IT service desk.
What university IT needs is a self-service handover platform that operates 24/7, scales with volume, and integrates with the same ServiceNow platform the rest of the IT organisation already runs on.
Smart Collect® handling the volume. ServiceNow handling the workflows.
The university deployed Velocity Smart Collect® as a ServiceNow scoped application running natively inside the platform. Smart Lockers handled high-volume student and staff loan, return, and exchange transactions, all tracked as first-class ServiceNow records.
For an environment processing tens of thousands of transactions a year, the architecture matters more than the form factor. The student and staff identity model already existed inside the university's ServiceNow platform. Smart Collect® inherited it automatically — no separate user directory, no parallel credential management, no second app for users to learn.
The result was a self-service handover platform open 24/7, with full ServiceNow visibility into who borrowed what, when, and from where — and automated overdue-return chasing built into the same workflow.
The hardware platform is already in place. The AI layer activates on top of it.
As ServiceNow's Now Assist and agentic ITSM mature, the same Smart Collect® workflows that processed 70,000+ transactions become accessible to AI agents — meaning a request, a reminder, or a follow-up can run with zero human-in-the-loop. The hardware platform is already in place; the AI layer activates on top of it.
Want to see what Smart Collect® could do for your IT operation?
A 60-minute discovery workshop maps your hardware-request volumes, regulated-site requirements, and ServiceNow architecture — and sizes the throughput uplift available to you.