How A Digital Mailroom Works

By Author: Donald Nason
Total Articles: 48
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Digital mailrooms have been helping businesses to turn their traditional mailrooms into a more efficient and effective process. The majority of business communication is in paper, forcing traditional mailrooms to become 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). By moving to a digital mailroom, companies can save on costs, improve processes and gain huge efficiencies.

What is a digital mailroom?
A digital mailroom solution captures and classifies all information entering into an organisation, then routes it to the appropriate person, department or backend ERP, CRM, ECM or workflow solution. The solution essentially helps businesses to effectively process all incoming mail efficiently and quickly.

How does a digital mailroom work?

Capture: The solution will capture and classify all incoming documents including paper, fax and email. The documents will be scanned into batches and separated using the criteria most suitable for your business. Once the documents have been scanned, ...
... the user can add, replace and delete pages as necessary.

Identify Document Type: In a manual mailroom identifying documents requires well trained staff with knowledge of departments, processes and subject matter knowledge. This process is often time consuming and can be prone to errors. However, with a digital mailroom the process of document identification can be fully automated. The intelligent classification technology employs a variety of different methods to identify document types, which means incoming documents can be classified into different categories such as invoices, contracts, forms, purchase orders etc; without the need to manual intervention.

Extract Data and Validate: The solution will extract the data held within the documents and validate both the documents and the data. Carrying this out before the document is forwarded onto the relevant department or individual, speeds up the processing of documents and eliminates the processing of invalid paperwork.

Deliver: Manually delivering mail throughout an organisation involves a physical mail trolley, pigeon holes or forwarding mail onto other locations. This is a costly and time consuming process and mail can often get lost during the delivery process or be delivered to the wrong department or individual. With a digital mailroom, documents are automatically sent to the relevant department or individual in electronic form. This will remove the risk of losing important documents as well as speeding up the process considerably.

Key Benefits

Lower operational costs
Via the elimination of paper
Due to the elimination of manual processes in the mailroom and throughout your enterprise
Through faster, more accurate routing of documents
Increase efficiency in all departments
Increase customer service/satisfaction
Improve mail security
Streamline operations and conform to regulations
Provide a fast ROI

Paper documents can be very problematic in a traditional mailroom, due to the risk of errors and a long winded slow process. A digital mailroom solution will replace this slow and inefficient process with a sophisticated technology that will not only increase efficiency, but also improve on your return on investment (ROI). In a survey conducted by AIIM, it was 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. This statistic reflects one of the benefits of a digital mailroom and how it can become an investment for companies that handle a lot of paper mail.

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