White Paper: Digital Mailroom Automation

Along with death and taxes, one of life's modern-day certainties is the ever-increasing volume and complexity of information processed by businesses. From customer correspondence to invoices, application forms, leases, remittances, direct debits and other communications, organizations face a growing stream of incoming data. In addition, businesses are under increasing pressure to ensure information from external parties is delivered quickly and accurately to the appropriate area within the organization. Complicating the difficult task of capturing and managing the enormous amount of transactional content are the many different ways in which this content arrives, from paper documents, to faxes and electronic communications. Finally, business managers must deal with these concerns in an environment in which regulatory compliance, customer service and cost reduction determine the difference between business success and failure.

To capture this content, businesses have typically implemented "point solutions" that focus on forms recognition, data capture and archive. As a result, most organizations have built their "digital horizons" (the boundary where the unprocessed paper is converted to digital content) close to the business functions they feed. A few have developed multiple horizons, drawn around different functional or geographical units. The result has been delayed visibility to key information, lack of traceability and accountability, information in the wrong place or not in enough places, and inflexibility and inefficiency in the deployment of staff and resources. All of these effects lead to increased costs for processing in-bound information.

In today's environment, especially as businesses are increasingly moving toward a shared services approach, management worries have shifted from line of business processing to the challenge of designing true enterprise level information centers that push the digital horizon out as far as possible to the extremity of the organization. These enterprise level information centers, also known as digital mailrooms, automate the capture and classification of all information entering an organization, route it to the appropriate application or knowledge worker and then provide mechanisms to audit and track it. To be truly successful, digital mailrooms must offer some basic, core functionality, including visual overviews of processes within the organization in order to monitor workloads and redistribute them as appropriate; encapsulation of installed capture and archive solutions to protect existing investments; a scalable application architecture that supports a wider digital horizon; and strong process management capabilities.