Improving mailroom processes
17/11/2010
We are in the era of ‘paperless’ office yet the amount of paper seems to increase, and this is certainly the case with the amount of physical post arriving.
There is a cost to handling this; from physically moving it, opening it, and redirecting it to the responsible person. In a large business with a lot of mail there is room for error and the mailroom process tends to introduce unnecessary delays in to the process.
But advances in scanning technology, OCR technology and the huge decrease in electronic storage costs now mean that mailroom processes can now be efficiently automated to save costs.
Printed material can be scanned on arrival. If appropriate OCR technology is used to generate a searchable text version of the document. This is then added to the database of documents stored. Most mailroom automation systems will bring together incoming documents from many sources:
- Postal services
- Fax
- Texts
These are then indexed and then routed to the appropriate person. This is done electronically and so works very well for remote offices.
One of the biggest benefits of an automated mailroom system is the improved traceability along with reduced costs for ongoing postage or copying.
For organisations with a large volume of inbound mail, then improvements to the ‘mailroom’ business process will save costs and increase profitability.
