Enabling Business Agility and Digital Transformation: 25 Admired Companies of the Year 2022

The Chief's Digest, May 2022

Enterprises are contending with a host of challenges in today’s volatile business environment. Perhaps the most urgent need, driven by the global pandemic, is to implement new flexible workplace strategies.

Document digitization has become a major initiative for many organizations as they look to grow their businesses, minimize risk, and enable work from home employees. Supporting remote workers in many cases includes digitizing workflows and ensuring timely access to documents and critical business information.

“Businesses faced extraordinary pressures during the past two years,” says Joe Marciano, president and CEO of Canon Business Process Services. “Many of these organizations maintained their operations and are now looking to thrive. Their key intention is to fundamentally transform their operations by automating workflows and leveraging other technology advancements. We can help clients meet their goals and be better prepared for the future of work.”

Harnessing the Power of Digital Technology

For over 30 years, Canon Business Process Services (Canon) has helped many organizations tackle these kinds of pressing concerns by harnessing advanced technologies and services to deliver agility, exceptional workplace experiences and improved business performance. Canon achieves these results by applying its workforce management capabilities, Six Sigma methodologies and implementation expertise. The key to the company’s approach has been leveraging its people, processes, technology resources and analytics to enable clients to maintain and improve their business operations in sustainable ways over the long term. To meet this goal, Canon deploys a wide range of solutions that encompass Business Transformation Services, Document Services, and Workforce and Workplace Services.

“With the right tools and partnerships, businesses can tap the expertise of service providers like Canon to launch digitization initiatives that help streamline operational efficiency,” points out Joe Marciano. He adds that one critical opportunity to automate documentation is in the mailroom. Mail is often a chokepoint in a business and has major impact downstream — to manually receive, sort, classify and deliver mail is labor-intensive and subject to error, all of which can be costly and detrimental to productivity across the enterprise.

A Better Way

Now there is a better way. Businesses are looking to meet these challenges — particularly as they coordinate their return-to-office strategy — by leveraging the power and flexibility of Canon's Digital Mail solution.

The heart of Canon’s approach is deploying what the company refers to as a digital intake center – a hybrid mailroom and scanning service that uses specialized mail scanning technology and workflow techniques to convert physical mail into digital information promptly upon receipt. That information is then delivered to employees or into the business workflow electronically, anywhere at any time, allowing employees the convenience of receiving their information quicker and enabling the business to move faster and smarter.

What a Comprehensive Digital Mail System Looks Like

An effective digital mail system comprises several key elements. It all starts when a customer, business partner or other stakeholder sends mail to Canon’s client.

Canon receives mail via the client’s mailroom. The Canon team sorts and prioritizes the mail according to business process rules set by an individual or department. The mailroom team opens and digitizes both the envelope and contents for electronic mail delivery. The next step can include the option to automatically classify documents according to agreed-up document types, service level agreements and business rules.

Finally, digital mail is directed to mail recipients who process their digital mail in their home or office, or anywhere they happen to be at the moment. As directed, Canon forwards, stores, or destroys the physical mail that has been digitized.

The Business Benefits of Digitizing Mail

Canon’s digital mail system can help improve the flow of information within an organization by delivering important business benefits, which include the following:

• Contained costs. By automating and digitizing its mail intake, a company can reduce the need for manual interaction — hand-sorting and delivering. This means that critical information can get into the right hands in a fraction of the time, helping to better contain overhead and liberating talent for revenue-driving tasks.
• Improved efficiency. Digitizing mail helps systematize processes because intake, processing, classifying, and delivering happens automatically, creating a more frictionless experience across the organization.
• Strengthened security, compliance, and risk management. Canon’s digital intake center approach helps ensure that mail and sensitive documentation are secure. The increased visibility afforded by digitization allows Canon clients to remain compliant with strict audit requirements, pivot more quickly in the face of new privacy regulation, and enhance their risk management strategy by centralizing and classifying unstructured data.
• Advanced customer service. Today’s digital customer demands rapid response time. Manual mail processing slows down the flow of business-critical information and delays action that matters to a company’s most important clients. By automating and digitizing its mail, an organization can increase response times, better serve customers, and be positioned to increase top-line growth.

Canon Digital Mail demonstrates how the company is focused on innovation to help its clients address current challenges and better prepare for the future. Whatever their clients’ business needs, Canon’s mission is to help ensure that they are ready to prosper in the days ahead.

Joe Marciano, President and CEO

Joe Marciano provides the vision for driving improved processes that enable clients to optimize their internal operations and capitalize on opportunities to streamline their business. In 1980, Joe joined Arkwright, Inc., a subsidiary of Océ USA Holdings. Arkwright manufactured and marketed digital imaging supplies for Océ and other brand owners. In 1998, when he was named President & CEO of Arkwright, Joe integrated the manufacturing, logistics and R&D of Océ Imaging Supplies with Arkwright. Joe was appointed President & CEO of Océ Business Services, Inc. in 2004. His leadership helped drive the company’s rebranding as Canon Business Process Services, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Canon USA, Inc. on January 1, 2013.