See how mailroom automation software can transform your organization — by processing incoming business mail the moment it arrives and delivering it electronically to the correct recipient.
A digital mailroom refers to a mailroom that processes incoming mail electronically. In digital mailroom automation, the goal is to use automation to index, route, and archive electronic copies of mail - paper and email.
Digital mailroom automation solutions use document scanning and capture technologies to digitize paper mail and convert it into electronic versions.
A digital mailroom will also deal with emails, and may deal with other forms of electronic communications. A digital mailroom is a mailroom that can bring all of these disparate sources of mail together. And it's a place whose functions – receiving, indexing, routing, archiving - have been converted to digital processes.
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While the goals of a digital mailroom are similar to those of a traditional mailroom, it works quite differently: all mail will get processed digitally, so mail that does not arrive electronically will need to be scanned.
Once mail is scanned, it can be automatically:
The paper copies of scanned mail can be routed, disposed of, or archived, depending on business and regulatory or other requirements.
1) Paper mail is delivered to your facility's mailroom. |
2) Mail is opened and scanned with high-speed scanners. |
3) Digital mailroom automation software reads each piece of mail to decide who should receive them. |
4) If pieces of mail should be sent to a person... |
5) An image of the mail document is routed by e-mail. |
6) But if mail documents should be routed to a department... |
7) It is moved into the data supply chain, where it is routed to the correct department. |
Electronic mail will go through a similar process, sans scanning; it will also be:
Typically, you will be feeding mail into a scanner after opening and prepping it. The preparation process:
Depending on the volume of mail in your organization, the mail might be scanned with a desktop scanner, but you will get far better results when using a larger, high-throughput model (shown in our graphics above).
You will most likely have mailroom employees checking the quality of the digitized document images, rescanning pages that fed or scanned incorrectly. They will also ensure that the scanners are clean and generating images of a high-enough quality to be read easily by both humans and automated processes through intelligent document processing solutions.
Good digital mailroom processing software will be able to:
For high-volume mailrooms, it can reduce the labor-intensive effort it takes to process the mail by an order of magnitude or more. It can also dramatically reduce costs, errors, and routing times.
For all mailrooms, including low-volume mailrooms, it improves reliability, ensures that all mail is indexed and archived, and simplifies retention, auditing, and the ability for line-of-business departments to have the mail they need, when they need it.
As a result, this means that your vendors, suppliers, and even customers will have a better experience when working with your company.
If your employees are talking with customers, your team can locate the mail documents quickly, which reduces the need to put them on hold and improves problem resolution.
According to some calculations, the carbon footprint of a single letter is approximately seven times greater than that of an email. Add to that the impact of additional physical routing, the paper, toner, and electricity necessary to print physical letters, and you can understand how substantial of an impact switching to a digital mailroom can have on your carbon footprint and the environment.
The key improvement of digital mailroom automation is efficiency: mail gets processed and routed faster, which means everything that comes in as mail gets dealt with more quickly. This can translate to fewer lost clients because of mail processing delays, and it can mean increased early payment discounts because invoices are moving through your system faster.
This means that your compliance relies on making sure that all employees are applying appropriate rules every time they touch a document, including:
This is much easier and more reliable with digital mailroom automation, because compliance processes can be automated. So compliance processes will happen correctly much more frequently. Audits can also be a headache if you have to manually sort through boxes or file folders of physical mail.
With a digital mailroom automation software, they can easily and securely access their mail documents from anywhere. There won't be a delay in receiving important messages that are sent via physical mail delivery.
Mailroom automation uses technology, like document scanning, document capture, and intelligent automation all working together to streamline mail workflows. It ensures that all paper mail is sorted, examined, data captured, and routed to correct person. It also maintains security and compliance standards.
Digital mailroom solutions help eliminate paper-based workflows through scanning, digitizing, and capturing data off paper. The capture data can then be used to understand who or which department that digital versions of the mail should be sent to.
There is a variety of solutions that can accomplish this from dedicated mailroom software, document capture solutions, RPA workflow software, and even outsourcing mailroom work to a third party.