Digital Mailroom solutions offer the opportunity to reduce the costs associated with incoming invoices and correspondence while improving workflow efficiency and decreasing the decision cycle. Digital Mailroom solutions have gained significant popularity and adoption among enterprises in the past decade. However, the concept of a Digital Mailroom among small to medium enterprises (SMEs) has remained somewhat esoteric and at times out of reach. PayStream Advisors has found this can largely be attributed to a lack of market knowledge.
Digital Mailrooms start with a need to reduce costs. As a business grows, analog mailrooms start showing symptoms of a bloated facility struggling to keep up with thousands to millions of inbound documents such as hard copy mail, faxes, emails, EDI and so on. As these offices start to become further and further entrenched, excessive costs become more apparent and the search for a solution becomes imperative. Solution providers like DataServe offer a highly efficient all-in-one data and document capture service in a cloud-based format. All invoices and correspondence are sent to one central location to be distributed by DataServe to their appropriate location in a user’s organization.
Digital Mailroom solutions such as Kofax’s TotalAgility center around a basic principle –all incoming physical and electronic communication is centralized, digitized, routed, and stored automatically with little human effort. Actual methods vary from solution to solution but typically, high-speed production scanners digitize handwritten and printed documents, while Optical Character Recognition software intelligently scans the documents for content. Based on this content (i.e. Addressee, Department, Subject Matter, Target Keywords, etc.) documents are routed to the appropriate person with little to no human involvement. Documents can also be barcoded to negate manual keystrokes and track individual correspondence. Not only does this allow a user to trace who has had access to a document, it also eliminates the risk of lost or misplaced mail.
With the implementation of a Digital Mailroom solution, a user will reduce costs and increase revenues. DataMark, a leading provider of Digital Mailroom services estimates that Digital Mailroom adoption stands to reduce mailroom costs by 20-50% by payroll reductions and process improvements. But the benefits don’t stop there. By eliminating costly errors and automating the document receivables process a user will improve efficiency and increase security. Decreasing the time is takes for documents to reach their destination increases workflow and overall productivity, reduces the decision cycle, and improves customer service.
Digital Mailroom technologies are continuing to improve and provide customers with countless benefits and ROI. PayStream Advisors will be conducting research on this topic and publishing a report in late Q3 of 2014 to educate SMEs about the untapped benefits of these solutions.
If you are a Digital Mailroom provider interested in being included in our upcoming report, please contact
