Post Perfect – Mastering the Digital Mailroom

“Don’t write wood, alright?” was the advice given by Greg Weinstein, a crooked stockbroker in the business thriller, Boiler Room. He was instructing his trainee not to send paper documents to potential clients. However, business at large has yet to embrace this advice. Companies still battle with managing their incoming paper trails. For organisations that deal with a large number of suppliers and customers across different sectors, paper documents remain the dominant business medium. With such a mass of paper, the only viable choice is to try and deal with it as efficiently as possible. This means broadening and enhancing all types of document capture, trying to extract the relevant business information from the paper it arrives on and funnel it into the corporate workflow for processing by the right department.

GOOD BUSINESS

This drive to streamline document processing serves two key purposes. First, it’s simply good business sense. It drives down transaction costs – automating essential back office functions such as order and invoice processing, and remittance processing – and is proven to deliver cost savings. At the same time, it improves customer relationship management, where up-to-date information is paramount. In customerfacing environments, data quality is also vital, so the detail of business transactions needs to be updated as near to real-time as possible.

Second, a digital mailroom addresses expanding information management legislation, from Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II to the Data Protection and Freedom of Information Acts. These all specify the need for companies to capture, track and control information as soon as it touches them, to enforce corporate best practice.