Digital Mailrooms have been around for over 30 years, since the earliest days of industrial document scanners, so they are nothing new. Despite a shift away from paper correspondence, Digital Mailrooms remain an essential part of the Digital Transformation toolkit.  However,to maximise the benefits of a Digital Mailroom the mindset needs to be more than just purchasing high end scanners, putting them in the basement with the old mailroom, and taking a photo of every piece of paper as it enters the organisation.

While personal email is automatically directed to personal inboxes, many organisation use generic email boxes to receive electronic correspondence from external parties. The principles of Digital Mailrooms apply equally to these generic email boxes – receiving emails or customer applications via electronically via email doesnt represent digital transformation! Here are ten things to consider when establishing your Digital Mailroom.

1. Have somewhere for your digital mail to go. This sounds obvious, but if the answer is into someone’s email box, or into a folder in a fileshare system, then you’ve just wasted your investment. Digital documents need to be stored and filed in a digital system – just the same way you do with paper. Directing digital versions of your inbound mail to either an email box or a fileshare is not Digital Transformation – this is just digitalising an analogue process, layering additional cost without any of the real benefits. Digital mail needs to be identified with metadata, stored securely with access limited to authorised employees only, and retained for the appropriate length of time. You may also choose to use a digital workflow system to route documents through all the workflow steps, and then archiving the record.

2. Set up a master document classification system. You might choose to follow the disciplines of formal records management, with a company-wide taxonomy, or you may choose to take a broad brush and simply categorise documents by department. The important thing is to have a series of “buckets” to classify your documents. Document classification is key within digital transformation as it enables records to be directed to the appropriate workflows, and then archived appropriately.

3. Enrich your images with data. Large volumes of untagged, uniquely numbered pdf documents sitting on a server are only marginally more useful to your business than a sack of unopened physical mail. With a master document classification system, you can establish key pieces of metadata you want to capture for each type of correspondence which means you can identify images, automatically direct them down specific workflows, and also decide how long you need to retain them. For example, for invoices, you should capture at least invoice number, vendor, date. For new customer applications, you would likely capture date, customer name, customer number. The metadata profile will be different for each document type, and the data captured at this stage can be ingested into ERP systems.

4. Decide on your operating model: Outsource, centralised, or federated-distributed; paper, electronic, hybrid mail types.

• Outsourced: Under an outsourced model, all physical mail is directed to a dedicated locked box at the post office, from whence it is collected daily by your outsource partner, opened, and scanned. The physical is then retained for a period of time to allow for any quality issues, and then securely destroyed (generally 30-60 days). Turn around times can be from a few hours, up to 48 hours, depending on your contracted service levels. With an outsourced partner, you leverage the scale of hardware investment and the know how of your outsource partner. Your outsourced partner will have processing options for physical mail, as well as inbound facsimile and electronic (email) documents.

• Centralised: Under this model, you will set up a centralised digital mailroom, with investment in scanners and imaging software to process all inbound documents. Physical mail is delivered daily (or sometimes twice daily), and then opened and scanned. All emails to generic email boxes and facsimiles should also be processed by this central team to ensure they . Urgent documents may be hand delivered to the mailroom, and can be processed with priority,
• Distributed / Federated model: With distributed capture, you enable multiple input sources for physical records, but centralise the processing of these records. You can utilise multifunction device scanners, or smaller desktop scanners distributed throughout the organisation.

5. Think Automation first. Automate the document supply chain – at a high level, classify document sets by receiving channel (PO Box, email address), and then use Smart Capture tool such as Ephesoft Transact to recognise and automatically identify document types and extract metadata.

6. Think Automation second. The reason you started down a digital mailroom path is as part of a digital transformation initiative. Don’t fall into the trap of simply digitalising your analogue process. Digital transformation is more than just transferring your old process into an expensive workflow system and buying . Smart Capture software can automatically classify inbound documents, and extract relevant data. Robotic Process Automation tools can take an inbound document and route it through your workflow, enabling true straight through processing.  For example, RPA tools can route invoices through an approval workflow, or set up customer accounts from executed agreements, or set up new employees within payroll, HR and training systems based on receipt of signed employee agreements.  RPA can also assist with taking data from web or mobile platforms and pushing it into the various enterprise systems to kick off subsequent workflows.

7. Model your volumes, and map out the timings of your process. Model for peak loads, and 2x, 5x, & 10x increase in volumes. How long will it take the team to open the mail, then prepare and scan, and then process through the recognition / data capture stages. If you are moving large amounts of data, model how long this takes to get through “the pipe” – from your scanning location through to the final resting point – bearing in mind that one A4 page equates to approximately 140kB of data. Model your process with parallel processing – not just sequential. For example, you don’t need to complete all mail opening before starting scanning – you might process in batches of 50 items, so that scanning can start before all of the document preparation is completed. Similarly, batch processing enables your data transfer to be drip fed, rather than waiting till end of day to transfer bulk volumes of data.

8. Plan for Return-To-Sender (RTS) mail and non-scannable items. RTS means something went wrong on the outbound customer communication process, and you will need to update your customer details. Plan upfront for a triage process for RTS mail. The optimal solution is to out-sort RTS items, scan and capture the customer details and direct the data stream to a separate customer database management team who can update details. You should also have a plan for non scannable items (eg product returns) – where should these be directed, or disposed of.

9. Maintain your Document Supply Chain. Any system with moving parts needs maintenance, and your digital mailroom is no different. Measure the efficiency of your document classification engine and establish a continuous improvement programme to increase automation. Track the productivity of your scanning team – pages per hour. Maintain your scanners – we recommend daily / weekly cleaning checks, and an annual maintenance visit from your hardware provider. Review your document classification scheme to check it still matches your business requirements. Do a sweep of your office – who is hoarding either paper or digital documents that should have been processed through the digital mailroom? Run high level compliance checks – if you set up 50 new customers last month in your ERP, is this reflected by 50 new contracts in your document repository?

10. Plan for multiple copies of the same document. Unless you have a fully paperless environment, you will inevitably end up with multiple copies of the same record – sometimes a paper copy along with a digital, or sometimes multiple digital copies. Which version is the original? If you have a scanned customer contract, sent in by your sales team to expedite the customer set up, and then the physical version follows a week later, which version do you keep? Your document management system needs to consider multiple versions, and formats of records. By capturing metadata at the digital mailroom stage, you can identify these multiple versions up front, and automatically process rather than arhive multiple versions of the same record, or process the same record through your workflow