How Can A Digital Mailroom Solution Help Your Business?

By Author: Donald Nason
Total Articles: 48
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Today organisations receive a lot of paper documents through the mail. To sort these documents out manually is a very time consuming and costly job, which could take hours to sort through and deliver to the right recipient, making the business process slow and inefficient. In the UK, it is estimated that 73% of documents received by companies are paper documents (62% from mail and 11% from faxes). A digital mailroom solution can help to speed up the process of handling paper documents by capturing the documents and sending it to the suitable person or department, which will help to improve the business process and efficiency and cut down on labour costs. A digital mailroom’s purpose is to help digitise paper, but it can also process electronic documents such as PDF’s and emails to help improve the business process further.

So what is a digital mailroom and how can it help? Solutions, such as Documation’s Digital Mailroom, automatically capture and classifies all information entering an organisation, then routes it to the appropriate person, ...
... department or backend ERP, CRM, ECM or workflow solution. It also provides tracking and auditing of that correspondence. In a recent report by AIIM, called Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PCs to Tablets, 70% of professionals consider that the use of scanning and capture improves the speed of response to customers, suppliers, citizens or staff by three-times or more. By moving to a digital mailroom, companies can gain huge efficiencies and help to build strong long lasting relationships with suppliers and customers.

The mailroom process will be different for every organisation, but no matter what industry or Public sector your business is in, the traditional mailroom process will include some or all of the below:

• Mail being delivered
• The mail is opened and sorted
• The mail is then manually sent to the relevant office/department/individual - this could take hours, or days in some cases, to arrive at the correct place
• If the mail is not addressed to an individual, generally it is then sorted by work stream, such as claims, complaints etc, before being sent to the relevant team
• The content of the mail is then reviewed and the information is manually entered into a business application – this is prone to error as information entered could be inaccurate or have parts missing
• If information is missing or inaccurate then this is passed to a further team responsible for contact the originator
• Following the information being processed, the original paper-based information is then transported to storage.

This very long winded process isn’t ideal for any organisation that wants to improve on efficiency and cut costs. A digital mailroom solution can help you to eliminate this time consuming process and replace it with a sophisticated technology that will not only increase efficiency but it will also improve return on investment. AIIM reported that 90% of organisations saw a payback period of less than 18 months when they invested in a digital mailroom solution, of these 37% had a payback period of 12 months or less. These statistics reflect that a digital mailroom solution is an investment to companies, with results being seen in a short space of time.

By automating your mailroom, you will also see benefits that include:

• Reduced operational costs via the elimination of paper
• Reduced operational costs through faster, more accurate routing of documents
• Increased customer service/satisfaction through accelerated processing and response times
• Improved mail security
• Streamline operations and follow regulations
• Become an essential tool in disaster recovery and business continuity

Automated mailrooms allow organisations to become more productive and to increase capacity and responsiveness. This will not only be beneficial for the business but also for the customers, as a quick response time will lead to better business relationships.

To find out more about Documation’s Digital Mailroom please visit www.documation.co.uk or email info@documation.co.uk.