Documents entering your organisation are the trigger for many business processes. Whether its a customer order to fulfil, a supplier invoice to be paid, or signed contracts for the newest employee, digital processes are often kickstarted from the mailroom.
The real benefits of a Digital Mailroom come when the focus is on enabling fully digitised downstream processes, utilising the full suite of automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence tools. Without this mindset, the solution regresses to a digitalisation of the old analogue process – expensive scanners and software, that now need people to operate and manage, and without any real process transformation.
How to attack the Digital Mailroom?
- Identify all inbound document streams: paper, email, facsimile, pdf upload from a web portal. The format or structure of these documents is not always controllable, and even when standard pdf forms are utilised, some external parties will print hardcopy, signs, scan and upload pdf’s, and others will complete digitally, with a digital signature.
- Automate and standardise inbound document processing: Use Smart Capture tools with machine learning and AI to transform all documents to a standard format, and automatically recognise and classify inbound documents.
- Identify the data elements you need for each document type – including the fields you need for downstream processing, and future storage / archiving. Plan to extract these data elements at the earliest stage of your document processing using automated data tools with validation on key data elements (eg cross match the identified customer name with your customer database, validate ABN number from the Tax Office algorithm).
- Plan for downstream automation: Automate your inbound processing (classification and data extraction), automate your document logistics (how to push the documents through your workflows, including transferring data into key systems), and automate your decisioning / decision support (based on the data attached to each document).
Benefits of Deploying a Digital Mailroom
- Speed: Direct documents to the right team for immediate action. With documents classified and key data fields extracted automatically directly at receiving point, you can direct them immediately to the right team for action. By removing manual steps such as review, triage, and data entry, documents can flow through your workflow at the speed of electrons! Customer response times are now measured in minutes rather than days:
- Process Cost: Remove manual processing and data entry. By extracting key data key as part of your inbound document mailroom processing, RPA tools can be deployed to remove all subsequent manual data entry processes, reducing your processing cost by up to 85%.
- Decision Automation: Automating decisioning yields dual benefits of speed and focus. By automating decisions on low risk transactions you not only speed up the overall process, but also free your team to focus on important, high risk transactions as exceptions.
- Leverage search: To truly leverage the power of search within your organisation’s content, you first need to ensure inbound documents are digitised with full text via Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Searching is further enhanced with smart metadata tags attached to documents – thinking ahead and setting this up at the mailroom stage saves time down the track and enables Knowledge Workers “to Google” the documents they need.
- Compliance: With documents properly classified, you can ensure you retain the right documents, for the legally required period of time. Any documents required for audit, or investigation can be easily located. Classification at the mailroom stage enables you to automate the application of retention periods.
Digital Transformation of your back office should start with your inbound documents. If you would like advice on establishing a digital mailroom, or are not convinced you are maximising the benefits of your Digitisation programme, contact 24PC at info@24pc.com.au for a free Digital Assessment.