Digital mailroom
Mail volumes continue to grow exponentially,[citation needed] stimulated by business growth and mobile workforces.
Some corporate mailrooms have benefited from the development of high-speed automation equipment designed for moving physical mail more efficiently through the system.
A digital mailroom designed as a central platform for information allows an organization to bring rationality to mail processing and significant gains in productivity and customer service.
One major benefit of turning all incoming paper mail into images as soon as it is received is the extent to which it shortens the decision cycle.
The security of the process guarantees the authenticity and integrity of the document, which aligns with the records management policy of the company.
The electronic management of incoming mail improves the handling of documents within service oriented companies and agencies.
Software improvements now make it possible to capture paper documents while importing electronic files and to process them together through the same production platform.
For fully unstructured documents (e.g. legal contracts, customer correspondence, and white mail), it is not yet possible to locate and extract all information.
Software using a graphical approach can analyze and classify mixed batches of structured or semi-structured documents in order to build a library of templates.
As a result, companies receiving high volumes of paper mail can make significant cost reductions every year.
Documents can usually be archived on a variety of electronic storage media and easily retrieved through a Web interface (thin client).
Content Management solutions need back-end repositories or databases (e.g. Oracle or MS SQL Server) to store the files and retrieval data.
During the last decade, these software solutions have benefited from the universal XML standard used to index, store and access files to and from any repository.
The speed, reliability and increased functionality of these high-end scanners can save considerable time and money in the long term.
48% of the survey respondents have a centralized, in-house scanning service, citing better indexing and closer integration with the process as the main benefits.
