Post modern

The mailroom is going digital as companies increasingly look to eliminate the flow of paper correspondence around the workplace.

By Bob Goodwin

Paper: whether you loathe it or ignore it, you probably don’t like dealing with it: the clutter, the filing and archiving, its disposal or recycling.

Yet despite the major strides being made toward electronic transactions, paper is still the lifeblood of business. The problem is, it flows only sluggishly through the bloodstream of a company and quickly builds up – leaving many businesses with the equivalent of high cholesterol and furred-up arteries.

As long as documents such as invoices, purchase orders and other financial instructions remain on paper, the only viable choice is to try and push them through the system as efficiently as possible. That means extending scanning and capture to as many document types as possible, extracting relevant business information from paper it arrives on and funnelling it into the corporate workflow for processing.

Many organisations have already implemented document scanning in their mailrooms to speed delivery and processing. But scanning is only the first step of the journey towards automating the mailroom. If it isn’t backed up by further intelligence and processing capability, all companies are doing is pushing the same blockage to a different location.

Let’s take a closer look at how businesses can move toward realising the true benefits of the digital mailroom.

Mailroom matters

The critical step is what happens after the scanning phase. This is the classification of all scanned documents and application of auto-indexing techniques via optical character recognition (OCR) or intelligent character recognition (ICR) technologies.

It is this step that allocates each document to a specific workflow path, with recipient details extracted so that documents can be automatically routed to the right destination: purchase orders to the sales and manufacturing departments, invoices to finance and so on. If the document management system can link to core business systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM), so much the better, as this can further automate and enhance processes. Without automated indexing and classification, companies are simply moving the paper jam a little further upstream.

Finally, all images and metadata extracted are released to a document image repository such as IBM Content Manager, Hummingbird DM or similar, to ensure security, safe archiving and auditability.

So far, so good. But IT projects with the implications and potential impact of an automated mailroom don’t just happen overnight. A phased approach makes most sense to address specific pain-points in the first instance and to ensure that the project can scale up when the pilot phase has proved itself.

As that happens, and data capture solutions are rolled out and implemented on a business-wide scale, what other applications can be found for the software in order to truly maximise the potential of the digital mailroom?

Why, for example, stop at simply scanning and indexing incoming paper-based mail? The digital mailroom could evolve into a unified messaging centre for all business communications which need to be traced within an organisation.

With communication methods becoming increasingly varied, it surely makes good business sense to develop a digital mailroom capable of capturing all forms of business communication from the paper-based mail to fax, e-mail and voicemail.

In this way, companies can put in place a more holistic solution capable of processing and indexing all forms of inbound (and indeed outbound) business communication, for a more coordinated and altogether more streamlined and effective business operation.

Lightening the logistics load

This was precisely the goal identified and set out by one major supplier and distributor of electronic and industrial components.

The company has more than two million customers in 21 countries and supplies over four million products from 3,000 manufacturers. It wanted to extend the traditionally accepted boundaries of the digital mailroom, integrating additional forms of business communication, such as fax and e-mail, in order to create a more efficient and streamlined sales and order-handling process.

With a network of distribution centres and sales offices located throughout the UK and customer sales orders coming in via post, fax, e-mail and phone, the company needed to develop an altogether more coherent and coordinated approach to managing order processing, ensuring effective customer-relationship management and positioning the company so it could deal effectively with further growth in customer numbers and with future changes in the way they receive sales orders.

Combinations and permutations

Such a large database of UK and international customers, and a global network of suppliers to source their products from, meant there was an obvious business need for greater automation within the mailroom.

With more than 80 million possible order permutations, the company needed a system that could streamline and automate order handling, speed up sales processing and remove any margin for error.

Greater automation would not only speed up the order handling process, it would also enable the organisation to coordinate ordering and dispatch processes more easily and effectively, thereby strengthening working relationships with suppliers and improving overall service levels to customers.

At this organisation, however, the existing business model was highly labour-intensive, with faxes being e-mailed at random to an operator, who then had to go through a total of seven manual inputting stages in order to fully process the order.

First, the operator would check the fax image for additional data or requests and enter this information into the memo field, and then find and enter the customer account number. If this was missing, a manual search would need to be carried out to get the required customer data and account number.

In addition, the operator would also be required to locate and input the customer identity details and confirm shipping details, enter the purchase-order number and verify that this is not a duplicate, and also enter any additional header data such as date of order.

Finally, the line-item order code would be added to the e-mail, and a cross-check carried out that the number of units and pricing match those on the document, before the order process could be completed and sent for dispatch.

Streamlining sales

The company hired a specialist consultancy to design and implement a data-capture solution which would automate this procedure and create a single-stage handling process, speed up the order-handling process and boost organisational efficiency by reducing the amount of manual labour involved in the process.

An end-to-end scanning system, which would import images from an e-mail inbox, classify sales orders, carry out data capture, validate the data and then export the sales orders into the GIMPS/Orbit system using an IBM MQ Series messaging client was developed.

The company’s existing Rightfax system was reconfigured to automatically send incoming faxes to an e-mail account – not another fax machine – in the correct business department, where they are monitored and imported into the data-capture environment.

Once here, the documents are automatically classified as sales orders or unknown documents. Sales orders are then further classified into specific customers, and detailed data capture is automatically carried out to extract the required data, which is then validated with an indexing tool and any missing data added.

A set of ‘releases rules’ then determines whether the orders are released directly onto the Oracle system (via GIMPS), and a multi-page TIFF image file is created for each document. An MQ Series client is used to pass an XML message containing the data for the document to the Orbit system.

Sales-order documents that fail the release rules or which are classified as unknown documents are forwarded to the company’s Siebel customer-relationship management system for further manual processing. If individual documents have been rejected, rather than a whole batch, an e-mail attachment is replaced by a TIFF image of the rejected document to enable the order to be resolved more quickly and efficiently.

Initially introduced for just one customer, the pilot’s success led to it being expanded to more business customers in the UK, to streamline the ordering process and improve overall customer service, delivery and speed of response.

The system is now being used to handle sales orders from UK customers more effectively and will also be extended and developed to automatically process orders from European customers in the near future, too.

For this, the company will create country-specific batch classes for incoming faxes and e-mails and develop additional data capture and validation rules to enable documents to be indexed remotely. Furthermore, the data-capture system will be converted to Citrix thin-client terminals for Europe-wide application.

Faced with the challenge of improving the speed of order processing and effecting greater coordination with suppliers across the globe, the distributor’s digital mailroom provides a unified messaging centre for all business communications – it doesn’t just open the post – which has streamlined administration and provided valuable traceability.

This case study is an example of how data-capture systems can be more effectively harnessed to address business needs. The solution has been successfully extended beyond the traditional scanning and indexing of inbound paper-based mail, to incorporate e-mail and fax-based communications.

Sales success

This approach has enabled the organisation to respond to and process customer sales orders in a more timely and efficient manner, as well as significantly streamlining and improving internal administration, order processing, and supply and dispatch management.

By fully utilising the potential of data capture, organisations can move beyond simply processing post and create a genuinely digital mailroom, one which integrates all forms of business communications – from fax and e-mail to voicemail – to create a unified and streamlined mail processing and distribution system.

Although most mailroom automation focuses on processing inbound correspondence and mail, the benefits don’t have to stop there. As corporate mailrooms handle both inward and outward mail, the next phase of automation will deliver further major benefits through response automation.

Extending the intelligence used to route incoming mail into the corporate workflow, certain types of incoming documents can trigger automated responses – such as acknowledgements of receipt of payment or a customer letter without manual intervention. Such features boost efficiency and raise the return on investment available from automation.

There are three very good reasons for mailroom automation – provided an organisation has the volume to justify the expenses, of course.

First, it’s simply good business sense: it cuts transaction costs across the organisation. Second, it improves relationships with customers because it puts all correspondence onto computer, enabling customer-service staff to be able to instantly recall every cheque, bill payment and letter it has received from the customer – provided the right workflows are implemented.

Finally, it also addresses expanding compliance obligations, which specifies the need for companies to capture, track and control information – especially financial information – as soon as it touches them. There’s never been a better reason to start sorting business post more efficiently.

Bob Goodwin is a managing director of consultancy Digital Vision, which has helped automate paper handling for clients as diverse as banking groups Barclays and HBOS, defence contractor BAE Systems and electrical retail group DSG Retail. He can be contacted by e-mailing info@dvtl.co.uk.