When does digital mailroom automation matter? Whenever quick, accurate document routing could make business run better. It conserves labor and budget, it maximizes visibility, and it gets the right documents to the right people—faster than ever.
Whether your mailroom is a physical place or an abstraction of all sorts of routing processes, the simple fact is that everything passes through it. That's why mailroom automation software delivers cost-effective results that few other workflow tools can rival.
No matter your industry, it's essential to find, process, and act quickly on critical information. However, standard mailroom processes are bogged down by complex human steps that hinder timely action while driving up costs. Digital mailroom software is really about more than digitizing mail. It's about taking award-winning OCR software technology, merging it with powerful routing features, and thereby making customers more responsive to key events.
Together, these features help clients to expedite transactions, improve customer engagement, and streamline document management.
Document classification is, and will always be, where business processes begin. Errors at this stage have a big impact and are hard to rectify, but automatic classification changes the game completely.
OCR software for mailrooms combines visual and content-based analysis to classify documents more accurately than any other digital mailroom solution on the market. It can then extract and export data, and even initiate transactions, all as the document type dictates.
For technical stakeholders, a single platform can do what used to require a messy mix of manual input and patchworked software. For business stakeholders, information is available and searchable in nearly real-time, for a fraction of the cost of traditional mailroom operations.
Invoice capture and processing is often a good candidate for a mailroom automation pilot project. Visibility and potential ROI are high, plus complex routing rules make for terrific real-world test cases.
Initially, the OCR application receives a digital file from a scanner, email inbox, or other electronic source. One email may contain requests unrelated to the attached invoice (e.g., change of address or subscription cancellation), which the tool can even classify and route separately from the invoice!
It's a common practice to receive invoices at dedicated locations, but the software can still separate them from mixed documents through comparison to predefined templates and through statistical analysis of the text itself.
Finally, all workflow executions and results are stored in a SQL database, giving endless reporting possibilities with its own built-in tools or any other standard reporting solution.
Digital mailroom automation is cost-effective as either a standalone project or the beginning of a larger paperless initiative. It can be implemented alongside a digital fax solution, for instance, or as a first stage in more comprehensive workflow automation.
To see OCR software for mailrooms in a real-world setting, or to learn more about our mailroom automation software solutions, please contact us today.