Digital mailroom

One major benefit of turning all incoming paper mail into images as soon as it is received is the extent to which it shortens the decision cycle. Employees can access images more quickly, regardless of where the documents were physically acquired. Files can then be processed very rapidly according to their level of urgency. Just as digital mailrooms facilitate the exchange of company information, they also facilitate the coordination of several people around the same document. The decision-making process becomes quicker and more accurate.

The various technologies at the heart of digital mailrooms help companies rationalise their processes, e.g. it allows companies to reduce costs associated with resending documents between sites.

Mailroom costs not only include staff costs involved in the distribution of letters, but also the costs associated with the resending, loss or deterioration of documents. A digital mailroom implementation has a direct effect on all those costs and becomes a key element of competitiveness for the company. Another source of paper costs is the one associated with the physical storage of documents. Encouraging employees "to do without paper" will quickly lead to the reduction in the cost of excessive printing and copying of documents. The aim is obviously not to ban the paper from the work environment but rather to set up a new coherent and secure organisation that makes the use of paper superfluous.

Ensuring incoming mail tracking has become a necessity for the majority of companies, with compliance regulation being a major factor. The earlier a document is transformed into an image file, the more reliably it can be tracked throughout its life cycle. Furthermore, a scanned document becomes accessible by all authorised users (as a PDF, TIFF or JPEG file). The file created includes more than simply images; it references one or more documents in the archive database and records all the actions carried out by the people responsible for the file. The security of the process guarantees the authenticity and integrity of the document, which aligns with the records management policy of the company.

The electronic management of incoming mail improves the handling of documents within service oriented companies and agencies. It enhances the quality of the service offered to customers by allowing staff to instantly access customer files and answer questions immediately. The improvement of customer service is considered to be of fundamental importance by the majority of companies.

Digitizing mail upon its entry into an organization coupled with content management systems allows mail to be routed to appropriate staff members regardless of their physical location. The growing trend of remote work has lessened the overall need for real estate for the company mailroom. Many companies are now opting for mailroom software to automate their entire inbound and outbound mail operations.

"Document capture" is the act of scanning paper documents so they can be archived and retrieved in their original image format. It is the most widespread imaging technology used by companies today. Software improvements now make it possible to capture paper documents while importing electronic files and to process them together through the same production platform. Both incoming paper and electronic mail can now be archived together at the same storage location. Another major change is the ability to scan documents from remote locations and to retrieve them through a web interface. This is known as distributed capture and provides many cost benefits to companies with multiple branch offices or remotely located staff.

Originally, forms processing technologies were only able to extract and validate data from structured documents such as administrative forms. The improvements in OCR technology now make it possible to automatically extract all data from semi-structured documents (e.g. Invoices) – the technical acronym for this is Intelligent Document Capture (IDC). For fully unstructured documents (e.g. legal contracts, customer correspondence, and white mail), it is not yet possible to locate and extract all information. However, technologies have improved enough to identify the document type and automatically extract key information that can be used to index the document and/or route the document to the right department or recipient.

Software using a graphical approach can analyze and classify mixed batches of structured or semi-structured documents in order to build a library of templates. Using this auto-generated library of templates, the software can then identify and extract data from any scanned document in a single flow. This image-based classification approach, combined with a full-text analysis of certain documents (based on a keyword search), are the main technologies used today to process semi- or unstructured documents. These innovative automatic classification technologies reduce the need for pre-sorting documents before the scanning process. As a result, companies receiving high volumes of paper mail can make significant cost reductions every year.

Workflow applications enable electronic documents and information to circulate inside the company. They might have to manage very complex processes related to multiple locations due to the globalization of companies. The increasing importance of security is another vital challenge. One of the key developments in workflow technologies is around making company processes and workflow processes more consistent in order to avoid organizational changes when implementing these tools. Although company organizations tend to become increasingly complex, these software solutions are becoming simpler in terms of implementation and interfaces.

Due to the high volume of documents that need to be archived by organizations today, it is critical that the documents can be stored rapidly, securely managed and quickly retrieved through a common user interface. Documents can usually be archived on a variety of electronic storage media and easily retrieved through a Web interface (thin client). There are many archiving solutions on the market today, some as a component of an ECM or document management solution and some as a stand-alone system specifically designed for the purpose of high volume, high speed archiving.

A document can be an image, a file stored and compressed in a tiff, gif or jpg electronic exchange format, or an MS Office file or a PDF file (Acrobat exchange format). Content generally includes all the above combined with any data/information as well as other electronic files such as e-mails and web pages. Content Management solutions need back-end repositories or databases (e.g. Oracle or MS SQL Server) to store the files and retrieval data. During the last decade, these software solutions have benefited from the universal XML standard used to index, store and access files to and from any repository. Relative to the other systems, content management systems manage more complex administrative, access and workflow rules in relation to the number of files and file formats it needs to support.