Feature

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 18 No 01 - January/February 2010

More and more businesses hope to increase operational efficiency and reduce costs by switching to a digital mailroom model, argues Roger Williams, Solutions Architect, RR Donnelley Global Document Solutions

The increasing use of electronic communications presents a number of challenges to the traditional mailroom service model. A traditional mailroom is intended to handle physical correspondence only and electronic documents must be processed separately or printed out before being integrated into the mailroom system. However, the printing, storing, indexing, archiving and general management of these documents can be a costly and time consuming process. As a result, businesses are now seeking to increase operational efficiency and reduce costs by switching to a digital mailroom model.

What is a Mailroom?
A mailroom is an integrated process-driven service intended to receive, sort, distribute and process physical mail deliveries entering an organisation. The traditional mailroom integrates many different services including mail opening, manual mail sorting, batching and distribution. In addition, manual quality assurance (QA) processes are often carried out to ensure the accuracy of the mail sorting, and audit trails are implemented to record mailroom data such as mail volume and destination.

This traditional mailroom model is designed primarily to handle physical correspondence and the increasing use of electronic communications, such as fax and e-mail, presents a number of problems. Typically, an organisation using a traditional mailroom is forced to manage electronic correspondence in one of two ways. The first option is to handle all electronic documents in a stand-alone system with little or no integration into the physical mail room process. Alternatively, electronic documents are printed out and then inserted into the traditional mailroom process as if it were a physical piece of correspondence. However, neither of these approaches is ideal from a business perspective.

A lack of integration leads to the increased cost of running multiple systems and potential customer dissatisfaction from the inability to cross reference communication channels. The printing out of electronic documents and integration into the physical mailroom can lead to customer dissatisfaction by slowing down the turnaround of customer correspondence, especially as the customer typically expects a fast response when using electronic communications, such as e-mail. Tracking and indexing both physical and electronic documents can also be a costly and time consuming challenge in a traditional mailroom.

What is a Digital Mailroom?
Like the traditional mailroom model, a digital mailroom is an integrated process-driven service. However, the digital mailroom is intended to receive both physical and electronic correspondence. All correspondence is scanned and can then be sorted, processed and distributed in a digital format. The notion of the digital mailroom is one that automatically captures and classifies all information entering an organisation, then routes it to the appropriate department or person while providing auditing and tracking of that correspondence.

A digital mailroom should offer the same services as a physical mailroom, but also incorporate a software, hardware and services infrastructure that manages all forms of incoming and outgoing communications. A typical digital mailroom splits sorting and processing applications between the client organisation and an outsourcer. The digital mailroom applications are hosted in the service provider's data centre and are accessed by user groups through a browser.

Physical mail is received into the mailroom where service providers then open, sort and scan documents to digitise all documents. As part of the digitising process, images of mail are quality checked to ensure that they are of the required standard for upload into the digital mailroom application. Items that do not meet the required standard are re-scanned. Images of each document are then uploaded into the digital mailroom application. There is also an option to place the image into a digital archive at this point. Images can be added to an archive at any point throughout the digital mailroom process along with any meta-data associated with the image which is captured.

Rough and fine sorts are carried out on the digitised mail in order to direct the mail to the correct "location". The digital mail sort environment is effectively a set of virtual pigeon holes with rules governing which items can be placed into which pigeon holes and by whom. Further rules govern who can pick up items from certain pigeon holes (i.e. the recipients of the mail) and what they can do with those items. Following the rough and fine sorts, which mimic the delivery of physical mail to client locations, the digital mailroom can then allow clients to carry out further detailed sorts of items. This would be analogous to distributing mail within a department or team.

Where appropriate (e.g. for routine, bulk operations such as customer address changes) the requests can be routed to a workflow application within the digital mailroom allowing processors to resolve requests from images. This can be carried out by the client operations themselves or by outsource providers operating from anywhere in the world. Processing can include manual processing and capture activities or capture using automated optical techniques such as intelligent character recognition.

What are the benefits of a digital mailroom?
The digital mailroom offers a number of key benefits, including flexibility, scalability, cost savings and reduced environmental impact from road transport. The digital mailroom maintains the integrity of paper systems but adds speed and scope to handle digital documents consistently, overcoming the challenges of dispersed businesses, increasing compliance and the demand for faster customer service.

In a challenging economic climate, all businesses are continually under pressure to reduce operational costs. Outsourcing mailroom activity to a digital mailroom provider offers significant cost saving opportunities. As correspondence will be sorted from digital images there are a number of areas where costs can be reduced at the mail sort stage. The mail sort is no longer tied to one location, allowing the activity to be carried out by the most suitable and cost effective resource.

Digital mail sorting operations take less space than manual sorting, which reduces office space costs associated with physical mailrooms. The sorting of digital documents is also much faster as there is no longer a requirement to move paper documents around a physical mailroom environment, which contributes to an overall reduction in resource costs for mail sort activity.

Mail distribution and haulage costs are also reduced as physical mail no longer needs to be transported between disparate processing sites. Correspondence archiving and retrieval costs can be reduced as, where regulatory compliance permits, digitised document storage can replace physical storage. This can deliver cost savings by removing the need for physical storage space and by reducing document retrieval and storage times.

Many organisations operate out of multiple locations, often in more than one country, and may use a number of outsource suppliers to deliver their customer contact services. The digital mailroom allows all of these sites to operate through a single integrated system with no need to transport any physical documents between locations. It also allows the flexibility to easily balance workload between locations and to switch locations/suppliers as required. The ability to easily load balance between processing locations and to operate out of multiple locations allows disaster recovery and business continuity plans to be implemented with ease and at low cost.

Where physical documents need to be transported to a processing location, and where multiple documents need to be present for processing to commence, then completion time can extend to days or even weeks. The digital mailroom allows process completion to be executed in hours rather than days. This is in line with current consumer expectations on rapid response times. The adoption of digital mailroom technologies can allow businesses to turn their customer communications departments into a competitive advantage.

Digital mailroom technologies allow all inbound and outbound written communications to be managed and processed using fully integrated systems. This allows all communications channels to be handled through the same workflow processes and for all related correspondence to be linked within archive systems. Integration of contact channels delivers consistency of approach, simplification of reporting and linking of all inbound and outbound correspondence regardless of channel.

Certain sectors, such as financial and government, are highly regulated and place demanding compliance requirements on organisations. The audit, tracking and storage of correspondence is one area where digital mailroom technologies can help these sectors reduce the cost burden of meeting compliance requirements.

Conclusion
By outsourcing traditional mailroom activity to a digital model managed by a specialist organisation, companies can focus on their core business activities whilst enjoying additional cost saving and efficiency benefits. The hosted model allows clients to selectively outsource specific processes within the overall mailroom and customer contact cycle and affords the flexibility to change how items are processed, and by whom, as their business develops.

Transferring to a digital mailroom allows businesses to reduce the cost of the mailroom and mail distribution, improve security and audit tracking, integrate with other communication channels and improve customer service.

More info: www.rrdgds.com

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