Looking to implement mailroom automation? Lee Fisher of Efficiency Leaders looks at the challenges and rewards of keeping it all in-house.

There are plenty of established business process outsourcing organisations providing dedicated mailroom automation solutions for business and government; so why would anyone go to the trouble of implementing an in-house solution? Some of the main reasons organisations look toward an in-house solution is definitely centred around automated validation of incoming information against existing known data within the organisational systems.

Usually when information enters an organisation in a mailroom scenario, very little, if any, information is known about the content of the incoming data. What greatly assists organisations is the ability to compare/validate information contained within the document or data stream to other existing information within Line of Business (LOB) systems or repositories. 

This expedites the flow of information throughout an organisation because information can be electronically routed to appropriate individuals and/or departments without human intervention.
Typically, with an outsourced solution, data is extracted but very little validation of information is able to be conducted against the extracted/keyed content because of technological challenges e.g. being on different domains: concerns about potential security breaches mean many organisations prohibit external access to business and IT systems. 

While there are many gains to be had from outsourcing the manual task of opening mail and keying data, there are significantly greater gains and increased efficiencies if the data is able to be validated against meaningful information that is accessible by the organisation and then electronically tasked/workflowed for final actions as appropriate.  Capturing the information as it enters the organisation also greatly improves management and participant visibility within all LOB processes.  Visibility of data from point of origination is another key driver for executives looking to adopt an in-house mailroom solution, especially if it will then feed a financial LOB process like Accounts Payable.

Maintaining privacy and confidentiality of data is another reason for staying in-house. How big a concern this is often depends on the downstream LOB process that is affected. Some processes are subject to higher sensitivity than others.

Regardless of the LOB process, an in-house solution can effectively and efficiently understand the content contained within the inbound data, and then decide which LOB process it belongs to and appropriately task personnel.  It may also automatically update an ERP application, depending on the classification and the level of validation that can be automated.

There is an ever growing array of intelligent information capture technologies available to organisations today.

Organisations are increasingly looking to reduce the amount of human touch points from the mailroom to enable the flow of information more efficiently and effectively to the intended recipient and Line of Business (LOB) systems where appropriate. 

Capture can even extend securely to mobile peripherals to push the workflow to begin at the widest rim within organisations and truly capture at the point of origination. 
Organisations adopting software automation at an enterprise level extend across almost all industries including Finance, Medical, Insurance, Manufacturing, Construction and Development, Infrastructure services and many more.

The Efficiency Leaders Automation Platform (ELAP) is an intelligent software capability to assist organisations in streamlining their business processes, including mailroom sorting and distribution, by understanding the content of data entering the organisation and deciding where it should go.

This process of understanding and deciding is the critical component that organisations have historically relied on human judgement, however with the growing positivity, confidence and enhanced functionality in software automation, Mailroom Automation is one area now offering a superior customer and user experience. 

ELAP automatically analyses the content entering the organisation. Based on the content and layout of the data, it is able to determine where one document ends and the next begins.  This process is commonly referred to as separation. 

Automating this step means that there is no need for separator sheets, barcodes, labels, etc. This saves a significant amount of time in the pre-scanning phase for paper documents and less human rework for other data ingestion methods. 

Once separated, ELAP automatically classifies documents into their respective document types based on keywords found from the extracted content and then applies the appropriate business logic for that document type. 

A high level mailroom solution inevitably feeds downstream LOB processes such as accounts payable and receivable, payroll, sales order processing, applications, enrolments and claims processing etc.  The benefit that organisations are realising through the deployment of a single, intelligent processing platform for enterprise efficiency are substantial.

Lee Fisher is Chief Executive Officer of Australian and New Zealand solutions provider - Efficiency Leaders.