Canon Helps Clients Digitally Transform Business Processes

For the second time, The Silicon Review recognized Canon Business Process Services (Canon) as one of the 50 Smartest Companies of the Year. During 2020 Canon has continued to help its clients weather the financial storm caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as sustain their operations and better prepare for future growth. The key to Canon’s approach has been leveraging its people, processes, and technology resources to enable clients to maintain and improve their business operations in sustainable ways over the long term. To meet this goal, Canon is deploying a wide range of solutions that encompass Business Transformation Services, Document Services, and Workforce and Workplace Services.

A Hallmark of Reliability

Canon knows that in a business environment plagued by uncertainty and disruption, companies need a reliable business partner in their corner now more than ever. A commitment to reliability has been a Canon hallmark for many years. The company was recently named to the Leader category of the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals’ (IAOP®) 2020 Global Outsourcing 100® list. The list defines the standard of excellence in outsourcing service delivery. This is the fourteenth straight year in which Canon has been named a Leader in The Global Outsourcing 100. Canon also earned additional IAOP Global Outsourcing 100 recognition by receiving top honors in four distinguished IAOP judging categories, including Programs for Innovation. This category is particularly significant because it recognizes a company’s ability to implement specific programs and resulting outcomes that produce new forms of value for customers.

Digital Intake Center Services

This year IAOP recognized Canon’s Digital Intake Center Services as a “program for innovation,” which delivers advanced, measurable business value to clients. Canon Digital Intake Centers comprise a hybrid mailroom and scanning service that uses specialized mail scanning technology and workflow techniques to convert physical mail into digital information upon receipt immediately. That information is then delivered to employees or into the business workflow electronically, anywhere at any time, allowing workers the convenience of receiving their information quicker and enabling the business to move faster and smarter.

There are four levels of Canon’s digital mail offering available. These range from level one, in which Canon scans mail at the client site and uploads it to a shared folder for distribution to recipients; to level four, in which mail is redirected permanently to a Canon business processing center for scanning and uploading to Canon’s Digital Mail Portal.

These approaches are especially relevant now. Many organizations across the nation have asked their employees to continue to work remotely to contain the spread of COVID-19. This situation is posing serious business challenges, including these two: What is the appropriate go-forward strategy for our business? How will everyone get their mail and important documents now if virtually no one is in the office?

To help ensure workforce safety and business continuity, enterprises are looking for ways to digitize and distribute incoming mail to remote employees. Now may be the time for these companies to revisit the digital intake center concept to streamline their operations, cut costs, and improve the flow of information. For business leaders looking to achieve these types of gains, there are five main ways their operation can benefit from a Canon Digital Intake Center.

1. Save Money and Increase Cost Efficiency

Digital mail is an advance that can help drastically reduce the manual labor and processing costs associated with mail delivery. By digitizing and distributing mail electronically, a company can virtually eliminate fine mail-sorting and distribution costs. This can also help significantly reduce the volume of nonessential and personal mail, freeing mail center personnel to focus on other value-added activities. In addition to these immediate cost savings, Canon Digital Intake Centers can help reduce paper-to-digital processing time, enabling the business to realize a variety of other cost-saving benefits (for example, vendor discounts for faster paper invoices processing).

2. Enhance Operational Efficiency and Process Throughout

What does it take to ensure that each piece of mail that a 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 Canon 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.

3. Strengthen Security, Compliance and Risk Management

With Canon’s Digital Intake Center services, mail is only accessible by its intended recipient or workflow. Canon’s controlled intake environments—which can only be accessed by badged employees—are monitored 24/7 by surveillance cameras. Once the mail is received, it is processed, timestamped, and added to the desired workflow with a clear audit trail. This gives the company’s security and compliance teams confidence, along with a paper trail for maintaining compliance with strict audit requirements.

4. Improve Customer Response Times

When customers need something, they expect fast response times. Using a digital mail system, an organization can respond to clients and potential clients faster than ever. Regardless of whether a client inquiry is received in paper or digital form, the Canon Digital Intake Center processes inbound mail and routes it to the appropriate recipient or workflow instantly, ensuring customer response times are as short as possible. This helps ensure that the company’s customers perceive they are receiving the best service possible.

5. Improve Visibility and Control

How long does it take a business to deliver each inbound mail piece to its intended recipient? Does all mail get opened by the right person and/or added to the appropriate business workflow? What happens if mail gets lost? Canon’s Digital Intake Center services provide the visibility and control needed to answer these and other critical mail-flow questions. With Canon’s methodology, all incoming mail is immediately scanned and documented, giving the enterprise unprecedented insight into the overall mail stream and any delivery issues. The organization has the ability to report on how many pieces of mail are received by each recipient or workflow, how long it takes mail to be processed from initial receipt to intended delivery, and where mail is getting stuck (potentially resulting in unhappy customers or wasted dollars). This type of insight allows business leaders to make mail-flow improvements that satisfy customers, reduce costs, and eliminate inefficiencies.

“Canon Digital Intake Center Services demonstrate how we are leveraging innovation to help our clients to continue to move forward through current challenges as well as support their digital transformation initiatives for future expansion,” says Joe Marciano. He adds that whatever their business needs, Canon’s mission, via its innovative approaches, is to help ensure that its clients are ready to succeed.