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Life Beyond Basic Workflow
and Document Capture

By Neil Snowdon

Background

During the early days of large scale corporate computing in the 1980’s, disk storage cost approximately $32 per megabyte. To purchase a T1 line, which at the time was only rated at 1.5 Mbits per second, you needed a second mortgage. As this new, and expensive, technology was becoming more widespread, the day was envisioned when we would work in paperless offices. Unfortunately, the reality of most early “paperless office” projects rarely lived up to the hype, and the promised return on investment remained just that — a promise. In many cases, such projects continued for two or three years and required major infrastructure upgrades before work could even be started on the application front.

Today, some key enablers have facilitated a surge in demand for these types of projects. Most notably, the general availability of low cost storage, extremely high speed desktop processing power, inexpensive high-speed data networks and the general acceptance of Offshore and Nearshore facilities for remote data entry, capture and exceptions handling have helped fuel the demand for new workflow and document capture projects. As we learn from previous missteps, and better understand how newer technologies can
be leveraged, the previous vision is quickly becoming a reality.

Why Invest in a Digital Mailroom?

One might ask why a company should invest in a digital mailroom, an operation many might assume is just an unimportant, hidden, back office function. However, closer examination reveals such an investment can dramatically improve the customer service experience by integrating multiple input work streams (fax, email, paper, IM’s, voice etc), thus enabling businesses to make better and faster decisions.

There are also significant cost savings to be realized by leveraging economies of scale in paper handling processes. For example, most large corporations have more than 30 percent of their mailroom and operations staff involved in basic document preparation and manual classification processes. Also, aggregating all of the data repair and exceptions handling can reduce costs further, especially when a move is made to an Offshore or Nearshore model.

Aggregation will also enhance compliance and information management because, long-term, it is not only costly but nearly impossible to do so for 10 to 15 disparate systems.
Once a digital mailroom is established, many companies will be well on their way to
achieving a true shared services model across their organizations.

Key Components of Digital Mailrooms

In today’s real-time world, a successful mailroom should meet a number of operating characteristics. First, all of the processes must be continuously monitored and presented to an operational dashboard so immediate decisions with respect to resource allocation and load balancing across locations can be made. Second, a company must be able to draw a picture through scorecards, SLA reports and other artifacts that will allow them to compare performance on a historical basis. In addition, most managers expect to have this information readily available on their desktop, smartphone, PDA in a highly graphical and easy-to-interpret format.

In order to achieve the above characteristics, the backbone of a digital mailroom must be based around an enterprise scale business process management (BPM) system. By having a BPM backbone, with its inherent workflow and rules engine, companies can easily add new jobs without having to redesign or build any new functionality. Business analysts who know current job structures can add the new work streams.

Other Key Components of a Digital Mailroom Include:

• Mail tracking based on barcode or other document identification
• Real-time quality assurance checking of all documents being scanned
• Auto-document classification
• Multiple OCR & ICR engines
• Operational Dashboard & SLA reporting systems
• Remote capture and associated management controls to handle network failures
• A smart client interface that facilitates high-speed keying for Onshore, Nearshore and Offshore

How Do You Ensure a Successful Implementation
and Return on Investment?

Ensuring a successful implementation and positive return on investment begins first with a pilot test. The test should be of a size and complexity such that it reflects the business units within the organization.

Success is also dependent on establishing challenging objectives for the pilot. While challenging, the objectives must also be achievable and directly aligned to the specific business case. Too many companies believe a digital mailroom will solve some of their historical organizational problems, thus the operational processes that will mesh with the new solution must also be defined.

Selecting a system integrator with a proven track record of delivering enterprise scale mailrooms is another key element of success. Adopting a mailroom solution within a small, 20-30 user community is relatively easy. An experienced system integrator will be capable of rolling out a functional solution globally in an organization with thousands of users across multiple countries.

Finally, document the realized benefits of both hard dollars and soft, as the full rollout will normally cross multiple budget holders who will all want to see a tangible return on their investment.

What is on the Horizon for the Digital Mailroom?

Once a digital mailroom is in full operation, moving to a true shared service model will be a simple step for most organizations. The end result will enable an organization to streamline its internal processes and become more competitive in their chosen markets.

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Neil Snowdon is vice president of Portfolio Management and Software Development at BancTec. He can be reached at 972-821-5745.

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