Digital Mailroom Explained | How Digital Mail is Transformed & Automated

Organizations constantly receive communications in the mailroom that come from clients and stakeholders. These documents need to be processed, responded to, and dealt with according to established business rules.

Mail is commonly a chokepoint in a business, which can have a major impact downstream. To manually receive, sort, classify and deliver your mail is labor-intensive and subject to error, all of which can be inefficient, costly, and detrimental to productivity across the enterprise.

Businesses are being challenged in today’s world to turn physical mail into actionable digital information that can be quickly accessed.

What is a digital mailroom?

A digital mailroom is a hybrid mailroom and scanning service that converts physical mail into a digital format that can be delivered and accessed at any time. This flexibility enables employees to receive information quicker and for the business to move faster.

Using document scanning and document capture techniques, documents are digitized and provided in an electronic format, streamlining the flow of critical business information to employees, enterprise content management systems or a process workflows.

How does a Digital Mailroom work?

Physical mail sent to your organization is picked up at the post office or at a business processing center
The envelopes and contents are digitized for electronic delivery through document processing automation
Digital mail is then directed to individual email addresses, departmental shared drives, within a white-labeled, cloud-based business workflow system
Digital mail recipients process their mail on a computer, tablet, or mobile phone
Physical mail is forwarded as directed, stored, or destroyed based on custom business workflows

Benefits of Digital Mail

Enhanced content repositories. Combining paper and electronic mail formats into the same document workflow can help make your organization’s content repositories more reliable and transparent due to automating the flow of incoming documentation.
Contained costs. Manual interactions such as hand-sorting and delivering are reduced. As a result, critical information can get into the right hands and begin working for you in less time, helping to contain overhead and free up time to focus on revenue-driving tasks.
Strengthened security, compliance, and risk management. Because digitization provides increased visibility, you can remain compliant with strict audit requirements. This allows your organization to be agile in the face of new privacy regulation, and strengthens the backbone of your risk management strategy by centralizing and classifying unstructured data.
Improved customer service. Today’s customers demand rapid response times. Manual mail processing slows down the workflow of business-critical information, delaying action that matters to your clients. Automating and digitizing mail can improve response time, enhance customer service, and increase your ability to drive top-line growth.
Improved productivity. Digitizing mail helps you systematize your processes; intake, processing, classifying, and delivering happens automatically, creating a frictionless experience across the organization.
Reduced carbon footprint. The overall goal of a digital mailroom solution is to convert paper to a digital format upon receipt by your organization. Reduced reliance on paper makes it easier for your organization to support larger goals of environmental responsibility and fulfill sustainability objectives. This communicates a positive message to your employees and customers and helps keep you in compliance with all regulations.

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How digital mail reduces paper usage and costs

Digitizing and automating document processing has become a chief initiative for organizations looking to maintain business continuity, minimize risk, and support a hybrid and remote workforce. Developing new automated workflows and ensuring timely access to documents and critical business information is paramount for that support. The excessive cost of copying and printing documents is minimized when documents are digitized. This includes labor costs because with digital workflow there are fewer manual tasks involved such as sorting, distribution and physical storage.

How Canon digitally transforms your back office

Canon uses an optimum mix of people, process, technology, and performance management principles to deliver improved efficiencies and results. The Canon Digital Intake Center offers a turnkey solution to move your organization into the forefront of mail center efficiency. Our end-to-end service includes mail center staff, digital mail system installation, imaging hardware, mail processing workflow design based on Six Sigma methodology, customer service support, and comprehensive reporting.

How a digital mailroom improves document workflow

Before a document or mail piece can begin being optimized through a digital mailroom, the business processes and workflows need to be understood. Canon utilizes Six Sigma methodology to identify the optimal workflows by assessing challenges that need to be addressed and opportunities that can be achieved after observing current document management processes.

Digitized documents that have been scanned and processed enable information to be quickly accessed and circulated throughout the organization because the document is no longer in one physical location. This allows the organization to work at the speed of the customer who expects to receive information quickly.

Canon digital mailroom in action

A leading vehicle manufacturing company engaged Canon to implement a digital mailroom solution, giving employees access to their digitized mail through the company’s email system. Inbound mail was scanned, indexed and classified upon receipt. Then the information was relayed downstream to intended recipients or through designated business workflows. The digital mailroom supports more than 300 employees.

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Digital Mailroom Solutions Summary

The path to digital transformation and electronically delivering business critical information throughout the organization begins in the mailroom. Not properly handling business correspondence and incoming mail puts your organization at risk of incurring higher operating costs, delivering poor client and customer service, and not meeting security and compliance requirements.

Organizations need to be more flexible with their workplace strategies to address concerns exacerbated by the global pandemic. They need to leverage digital transformation solutions that better support hybrid and remote work employees, as well as implement automated workflows that give employees fingertip access to critical business information. With the right tools and partnerships, digitization initiatives can hone process workflow and help streamline operational efficiency.

Learn how digital mail can accelerate your digital transformation