Six Applications, One Operating Model:
Inside UC San Diego
Inside UC San Diego
What began as a fix for a paper-based gas cylinder process has become the operational backbone for surplus sales, asset management, self-storage, and sustainability programs across campus.
The Problem
UC San Diego ran on paper. The University store tracked gas cylinder orders and deliveries with paper forms — simple, but manual, error-prone, and nearly impossible to audit. When a cylinder went missing, there was often no clear record of who had it last, so the store absorbed the $250 replacement charge itself. Checking inventory levels meant walking the floor. Reordering meant guessing.
The same pattern repeated elsewhere on campus. Surplus Sales handled intake on paper and tracked inventory in a separate system from STORE, which made it difficult to confirm an item’s status or move it efficiently from receipt to resale. Departments that needed the same information were working from different records.
With dozens of workers, hundreds of faculty members, multiple suppliers, and thousands of order forms, the cost showed up as hundreds of hours a month and revenue that quietly leaked out of the process.
The Solution
UC San Diego started with the gas cylinder problem and solved it first.
TrackVia digitized the paper process and automated the handoffs between steps. Orders arrived and workers fulfilled them against digital pick lists. The platform generated the transportation tags required by law for moving compressed gas. On delivery, customers signed electronically, capturing the exact time and location of every drop. Reordering and inventory verification ran automatically instead of on someone’s memory.
It worked, and other departments noticed. Over the next six years, UC San Diego extended the same approach — configure the platform around the existing process rather than rebuild the process around software — across five more applications:
- STORE and Surplus Sales as a single integrated workflow
- Gas cylinder inventory for research operations
- Self-storage management
- Water-bottle refill program, supporting 600+ active accounts
- Campus logistics and service requests
The Surplus Sales workflow is the clearest example of what integration buys. Intake, inventory, validation, and listing to Rainworx and GovDeals now run in one process. An item is received, catalogued, priced, approved, and posted to a public auction platform without leaving TrackVia — and without anyone rekeying it into a second system.
That workflow feeds a genuine circular economy on campus. Usable property is reused by other departments, resold to the campus community, sent to public auction to reach buyers beyond UC San Diego, or recycled through established channels for metals, electronics, monitors, and refrigeration equipment.
The Results
Surplus Sales runs at sustained scale. UC San Diego has sold 32,801 lots through TrackVia since 2020, averaging just over 5,000 lots a year — every year from 2021 through 2025. That consistency matters more than any single year’s total: it’s a program operating at scale, not a spike. Those sales have transacted more than $8.8 million for the university.
Manual data entry is gone. Asset and inventory levels are centralized and current, which ended the one-off emergency orders that used to follow every stockout.
Losses dropped. Chain of custody is documented end to end, so missing items are traceable and the store is no longer absorbing charges it didn’t cause.
Delivery is faster and more accurate, which is what customer satisfaction actually comes down to for the departments and researchers on the other end.
Delivery velocity holds up under pressure. In 2026, the STORE and Surplus Sales shipped 42 tasks in 3.5 months, 100% on time, completed ahead of a key team member’s planned leave.
Why It Scaled
The partnership didn’t start with a campus-wide mandate. It started with one department, one manual process, and a platform flexible enough to fit the way that department already worked.
That’s the part other institutions tend to underestimate. Configurability isn’t a feature checkbox, it’s what determines whether the second department adopts the system, and the third. UC San Diego’s six applications exist because each one could be shaped around an existing workflow instead of requiring the workflow to be rebuilt around the software.
What's Next
UC San Diego continues to identify new processes to bring onto the platform. With integrations to 6,000+ systems and a configuration model that adapts to institutional requirements rather than overriding them, the same approach extends to facilities operations, compliance, inspections, and any other process still running on spreadsheets and paper.
STATS AT A GLANCE
- 10 years partnering with TrackVia
- 6 live applications across departments
- 5.9M records tracked across all applications
- 32,801 surplus lots processed since 2020 through a connected digital workflow
- $8.8M in value transacted through surplus sales
- $1.7B supported in research operations