How Your Business Can Benefit From A Digital Intake Center: Part 1

In this and my next column, I will spotlight five ways your business can benefit from a digital intake center. Let’s begin with a definition. At Canon Business Process Services (Canon), we define a digital intake center as a hybrid mailroom and scanning service that uses specialized mail scanning technology and workflow techniques to convert physical mail into digital information immediately upon receipt. That information is then delivered to employees or into your business workflow electronically—anywhere at any time—allowing your employees to receive information quicker and enabling your business to move faster and smarter.

What is driving this approach? The time it takes to convert thousands of inbound paper documents into digital information matters, and organizations with sound digitization strategies are in the best position to improve customer service, reduce operational costs and mitigate risk. That is why more businesses are leveraging digital intake centers.

With this scenario in mind, let’s look at the first two ways your organization can benefit from a Canon digital intake center.

1. Save Money And Increase Cost Efficiency

With a digital intake center, you can drastically reduce the manual labor and processing costs associated with mail delivery. By digitizing and distributing mail electronically, you can virtually eliminate fine mail sorting and distribution costs. This can also help you significantly reduce the volume of nonessential and personal mail, freeing your mail center personnel to focus on other value-add activities. In addition to these immediate cost-savings, a digital intake center helps you reduce paper-to-digital processing times, in turn enabling you to realize a variety of other cost-saving benefits (for example, vendor discounts for faster paper invoice processing).

2. Enhance Operational Efficiency And Process Throughput

What does it take to ensure that each piece of mail your business receives is sorted, classified, repackaged, tracked and shipped to the intended recipient? For many companies, this process involves dozens of full-time workers, duplicative work and unnecessary workflow stops. A digital intake center, however, eliminates these inefficiencies by scanning inbound mail immediately upon receipt, while simultaneously indexing and classifying each mail piece. This digitization and straight-through processing removes inefficiencies, and enables instant delivery of business information to the intended recipient or business workflow.

I will highlight three more ways you can achieve business gains through a digital intake center in my next post. In the meantime, feel free to visit the Mail Services page of our web site for additional insights on industry trends and best practices including white papers, case histories and more.