Digital Mailroom – Unified Mail Handling

Digital mailroom – an entry hub for business process data

A core element of DCS electronic mailroom solutions is the ability to channel incoming post, fax and electronic mail into a single, traceable information handling process.

This means the benefits of digital mailroom go beyond efficient collection and delivery of multi-channel mail items to include becoming a key hub in complete end-to-end business processes such as purchase-to-pay, sales order processing, claim processing, HR, marketing, finance or customer service.

DCS electronic mailroom systems process and integrate the following forms of incoming mail:

Paper based mail

Channelling postal items into the automated mailroom process involves scanning and digitising upon receipt. Paper items no longer need to be manually sorted, as sorting of the digitised documents is performed automatically downstream of the scanning stage. DCS can advise on the best scanning hardware and software options to meet your needs.

If you are outsourcing mailroom to DCS we use mailroom handling equipment to bring further productivity benefits through automated extraction and sorting of envelope contents, and our scanning systems deliver high rates of throughput with high quality and accuracy.

Fax mail

Instead of generating more paper and adding to consumables costs, incoming faxes are imported from a fax server straight into the automated mailroom process. The automated mailroom process flow also overcomes the frequent lack of central control and unstructured way in which incoming fax communications are handled in many organisations.

Electronic mail – email, SMS, voicemail

The capturing of incoming electronic mail into the mailroom workflow can be configured to include email (and email attachments such as PDF, Word documents or spreadsheets), web forms, XML data, bulk feeds, SMS text messages and voicemail.

In many organisations email still represents an unstructured form of receiving business communications which lacks proper control, and this can be addressed with digital mailroom systems.

The digital mailroom automation process

• Scanning and digitising – converts incoming paper or fax documents into digital form.
• Classifying – using intelligent document recognition technology to identify different document types, such as letters, invoices, applications or claim forms belonging to different business processes.
• Extracting – technology capable of recognising and extracting relevant data such as account or invoice numbers, addresses, supplier names or even matching and validating of signatures on items such as cheques.
• Routing – delivering items of mail or extracted data to the right person, back office system or process according to pre-defined workflow rules.