Digital Mailroom

Process Improvement Ideas: A Digital Mailroom

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Digital Mailroom


A digital mailroom is the effective and digital (believe it or not!) way of managing all incoming post. Sorting electronic and paper mail in a timely manner to ensure they reach the right department when needed.

Remember when receptionists could sit for hours each day, opening the post with a letter knife and walking around the office delivering mail to the right person? I do, as it used to be me!

That may still partly be the case for some organisations but these time consuming processes cause delays and affect how businesses communicate with customers and suppliers.

A digital mailroom provides a pathway to change by reducing paper use, limiting the need to print and efficiently organising information.

Think about amount of inbound data your business receives; in the post, via email, phone calls, web orders and then how it’s organised and by who. Is everyone following the same system and is information being stored in the same way?

If the answer is no, things could be getting a little hectic and during busy times, your existing processes could buckle under the pressure.

A Digital Mailroom and Document Management

Digital Mailroom

Digital mailroom solutions mean your incoming post is dealt with and stored in the same way by everyone no matter what format it is received in.

With a Document Management System, paper documents are scanned in while emails can be automatically stored from an inbox. Whether it’s a supplier invoice or a contract with a new customer, all incoming data gets stored in one central and secure location.

Only authorised users can use the system and access to documents can be strictly controlled, for                                    example HR are the only employees able to view staff records.

Integration with Internal Systems

Integration with Internal Systems

With DocuWare’s Connect to Outlook functionality, the system can integrate with Office 365 and automatically store emails from your inbox, making email management simple.

It can remove shared mail box headaches by monitoring a watch folder and when emails meet a certain criteria defined by you on implementation, they are pushed into document trays to be dealt with accordingly. Any incoming post marked as urgent for example, can be immediately forwarded to management.

Once a document is in DocuWare users can choose whether to trigger a workflow. If they select yes, a task is generated for the relevant person in the process. Whether it’s an invoice to be approved or a CV to be read, once the task is complete, a digital stamp can be applied to the document.

Intelligent Indexing

In order for any digital mailroom to operate successfully, accurate data, captured at the start of a process is vital. If incorrect information flows through the business, whether it’s from manual entry or missing information, problems will occur.

Once a document is in DocuWare, Intelligent Indexing runs on it to extract the most important pieces of information that are relevant for the organisation– dates, names, reference numbers etc. This information then becomes the document search criteria, bringing results back                                                              in seconds.

Intelligent Indexing is based on machine learning and with each scan, begins to remember where to find the most valuable information on a document. Any manual corrections are learnt too, continually increasing in speed and accuracy.

DocuWare can be linked with any business system. An invoice can arrive, be processed, stored and pushed to a Finance package without any manual intervention.

GDPR Compliant Software

With so many data protection regulations to follow it’s important to ensure any incoming post containing personal data is dealt with efficiently and compliantly.

The penalties for a GDPR infringement can range from a warning from the Information Commissioners Office to a maximum fine of 4% of an organisation’s annual global turnover.

With this in mind, any system used to process personal data needs to be GDPR compliant. DocuWare can help – it is quick and easy to locate any personal data stored within documents. It can export, correct and delete personal data while ensuring this data is protected for as long as it’s in the system.

The Benefits of a Digital Mailroom

A digital mailroom can be tailored to suit business processes and requirements. By automating incoming mail from receipt, through to capture and storage, organisations can benefit from a reduction in postage, print, physical storage and staff costs.

Adopting a digital mailroom will also help to reduce paper use, increase customer satisfaction and give staff more time to focus on other tasks away from the admin of processing mail.

Information coming from a variety of sources is electronically captured and classified meaning it’s readily available and accessible at any point in a process. Management can easily see where an invoice or a customer order is up to, as well as any tasks that haven’t been complete.

From experience with our clients using document management software, we know this level of automation works and they see the ROI.

If you’re thinking about implementing a digital mailroom, we offer free process assessments that can help.  We will chat with you about how you currently work, understand the challenges you’re facing and explain how an automated solution will streamline your processes.

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The Pandemic will bring changes

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It is nearly a year now since the UK went into lockdown, although we have had a few breaks in the summer where restrictions were loosened, we are now back to where we were before, with the hope that the vaccine will give us hope that life will return to normal around Easter. However, realistically most medical experts believe the summer will be a time when normality may start to come back.

The big question is what does this mean for business? At the start of the lockdown companies reacted as best they could. Employees were instructed to work from home and the government gave help with a wide range of support including notably the Furlough scheme and bounce back loans. This position has been extended but will business be the same when normality begins to take place.

Predicting the future is difficult especially when the business environment is turbulent. Many companies are on their last legs and others are planning how they can gradually manage to restore their position with the years ahead. Will the office look the same? will people start to go back to work from the office again on a full-time basis?  do companies want to retain large offices? and how are business going to work in the future, all leading questions that need to be considered.

Looking at how many people have adapted to working from home it looks like there will be some long-term changes even if we do return to some form of normality in the summer and this is where we need to consider making changes now to manage the position in the future. A strong competitive business has the ability to communicate internally and externally effectively and one area since this pandemic has taken place is the issue of communicating internally. With all the business processes from the accounts department, human resources, sales, order processing, sharing information across different departments, working on projects together collectively, storing information and accessing documents has been difficult. Yes, the Cloud has been a great help, although the biggest issue is finding all the information in one place, working on projects together, sharing and accessing information. Another area that has become a headache is compliance and security and although information is held in the Cloud it does not mean that the information is secure and compliant.

With the cost of running the business and survival being of utmost importance many companies are now looking at ways to reduce operating costs whilst maintaining productivity and having a competitive edge in the marketplace. Investment in the IT infrastructure has never been more important and many companies are looking at a Document Management system to streamline the business to make it far more competitive, as well as linking all their systems together, meaning information is available at a touch of a button, business processes are streamlined, ensuring that business processes are speeded up and the requirement for office space and employee resource is reduced, cutting the costs dramatically for the business and making the company more competitive with plenty of room for controlled growth in the future.

If you would like to look at ways of streamlining your business, whilst improving all your internal business process, then perhaps its time to look at our Document Management software it will put your business back in the driving seat for now and especially the future.

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What headaches do you have managing documents?

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Does this sound familiar?

Incoming mail and information to the business

This is one of the most labour-intensive areas of the business, whether it is incoming mail, emails with PDF attachments or documents of any format coming from different departments or company subsidiaries. The information must be sorted, distributed to the correct recipient, managed, and filed for reference.

Filing and retrieval of information

There are so many ways people file information either electronically or hard copy. It is incredible to think, currently, we still have the same problems we had many years ago. Employees and departments all have their own indexing systems and a document can be misfiled making it difficult to find the information later.

Storage of information

In today’s business environment, many companies scan documents and save them electronically either in the cloud or internally on their servers. Many businesses also store most of their incoming email traffic on their server exchange without any thought about disaster recovery (if a record is deleted or lost because of a malfunction). There are still many companies that store hard copy documents in the office or at storage sites and this can be very expensive and labour intensive to manage.

Retrieval of information

This can be a very time-consuming exercise and stressful. Yes, it is easy to retrieve an email quickly if you know the content of what you are looking for and it can be fairly easy if the document has been filed electronically in the right electronic file. However, what if it is a PDF document? What if the document has been put back in the wrong file? What if the file has been taken out of the office or somebody else has taken it? What happens if the files are kept offsite from the office or in different software applications like CRMs and accounting packages? What time is wasted in retrieving the information and what is the cost?

Compliance and Security

This has become more of an issue today than ever with cyber crime growing in our society and company regulation being implemented on a daily basis, it has become very hard to manage and police within the business What is worse, companies not only lose money via the cyber crime, they are also under threat of financial penalties for non-compliance.

If you wanted to find the magic answers to the above and we can show you how this can be achieved.

Call 01444 462 980

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Translating documents through your printer

Translating documents through your printer

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Getting a document translated into other languages can be time-consuming and manual depending on the resources you have available. Even when using an online translator, it can take time to ensure that the final documents are accurate.

Having a way to translate documents easily and quickly is a game-changer for those that often need information in different languages for different audiences, whether it be internal communications with other global offices or creating content for your global audience.

The Xerox® Translate and Print App utilises state-of-the-art technology to provide instant, machine translations via your Xerox multifunction printer (MFP).

This means you can scan a document, choose one of 44 languages and then get an instant, accurate translation of the document in your chosen language. Further still, powerful OCR capabilities can automatically convert non-editable documents into an editable format for additional translation edits, if needed.

Here’s how it works:

Step One: Log into your Xerox MFP and select the Translate and Print App

Step Two: Select the source and target language (i.e. source: English – Target: Spanish)

Step Three: Scan in the source document

Step Four: Receive the translation draft as either a printout and/or via email

What-docuware

What is Docuware?

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When you really need your documents – and fast – the last thing you want to do is root around in the archives going through boxes of dusty files.

That`s where Docuware comes into its own. Archives have a habit of growing, and becoming hard to handle. Busy employees find it hard to keep track of the ever growing stack of paperwork, and it causes interminable headaches if something goes missing.

Docuware`s electronic document management solves the archiving problem, automatically scanning and storing documents for you. Here’s a video to show you how it works to make your working life a whole lot better….

speedy-solutions

Speedy solutions to age old problems

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Impressing clients with your quick turnaround times is vital to keep your business ahead of the competition. But if you are still having to cope with mountains of paperwork the old fashioned way – think about going digital. It is easy to get to grips with the paper processing and stop your archiving spiralling out of control – which is where we come in.

These days, document workflow solutions offer a big business boost. Using the latest technology to capture and convert documents into digital form accurately and safely –we can help to get that job over and done with and sent to the right people for action!

Come and talk to us for an honest assessment of what your business needs and we can show you how swifter capture of information into digital form can help your workflow and so that information be traced reliably and stored. So you won`t have to add to the ever growing mountain of paper in the cellar. Paperless solutions enable more work to be done, more quickly, than ever before!