What Does a Digital Mailroom Do?
Being firmly lodged into the digital age, you would think that receiving, sending and sorting business mail was a thing of the past. Ok, when you want something to carry a powerful message to your customers, the tangibility of mail still carries impact. When circulating documents around your organisation though, nothing beats the speed and efficiency that a digital mailroom offers.
Despite this, many companies are still finding themselves bogged down in paperwork. Swamped in a backlog of invoices, forms, contracts and orders, many are spending more time doing admin, and less time doing the things that they do best.
So what is a digital mailroom? And what does it offer? A digital mailroom is essentially the most organised, hardworking secretary you have ever had. By digitising all incoming mail, all communications can be handled by the same process, allowing for a greater degree of standardisation and efficiency. An incoming document will go through three main stages.
Capture and Classify
For mail to be correctly distributed around a company, an incoming mailroom requires well trained staff with an in-depth knowledge of the business, its departments and its personnel. A digital mailroom can be operated by anyone, scanning documents in and letting the automated system decide what belongs where.
Analyse and Extract
A single document needs to be seen by many different parts of an organisation, meaning that incoming mail needs to be photocopied and divided around the business. This is slow, expensive and clutters the office with paper. Imagine a system which can read a document and extract only the relevant data. A purchase order, on arrival at a business, can be analysed digitally. The order and payment can be read and sent to the dispatch and accounting departments, before the whole document is archived.
Divide and Deliver
Not only does manually analysing documents require a skilled workforce, depending on the size of the company, the physical act of distributing them may need a small army. Having digital copies of documents can get this job done in seconds, at a fraction of the price.
The workload of the recipients can also be relieved. The accounting department, instead of having to manipulate raw data, can have all the information they need delivered in the format they prefer.
This may not seem too sophisticated, most companies already use shared documents and email internal memos back and forth. What a digital mailroom does though, is take paper out of the equation, removing any potential for errors.
Working with both paper and digital copies can be confusing, even for the most skilled administrator. A digital mailbox helps remove this confusion by having all important data available on one platform.
This service works best when forming part of an integrated document management system. By removing paper from an office, a business can become more efficient, responsive and streamlined.
