As the holiday season warms up, many will begin sending gifts and letters to their colleagues. This is a simple process for small companies—you can walk a few steps and leave the correspondence on their desk—but when it comes to large enterprises with 1000+ employees, it gets complicated. While some may want to step out of their office and present their gifts in person, some may choose to use their company’s internal mailroom services.
A mailroom system handles all the incoming and outgoing mail for large organizations. The process starts when an employee drops their mail into an established mailbox on premises, or they give their mail to a mailroom clerk, who then reads and sorts it manually for distribution. Incoming mail from external sources is also routed through this same process. On the surface, this appears straightforward, but mail can come in many forms (letters, parcels, etc.), creating complexity for human operators. The resulting human error can mean long delivery times, lost mail, or misplaced parcels, and to top it off, these human operators incur high labor costs for their organization. For these reasons, companies are beginning to research innovative technologies that can alleviate these issues and open doors to true mailroom automation.
Digital Mailroom systems allow companies to improve the speed and accuracy of internal mail processing while reducing human error.
New digital mailroom solutions entering the market are often powered by Artificial Intelligence technology to help automate traditionally manual processes. The AI algorithms, combined with powerful OCR software, can recognize and extract address information from letters, flats, parcels, forwarded mail, reply mail, and bundles. This allows companies to properly sort mail for delivery within the organization. Some organizations choose to take these solutions a step further, and they fully digitize inbound mail using openers and scanners. Software can then be used to extract information from the documents inside the envelopes including invoices, receipts, claims, and other complex documents. To ensure high accuracy rates when reading different variations of mail, the software can use context recognition and data cross-validation against the company database.
Using the highly customizable features listed above, companies can configure and optimize their system for best performance according to their needs. Third-party research shows that mailroom automation systems are expected to grow in the coming years due to increased interest in process automation and a shortage of human operators necessary to support mailroom operations. Overall, digital mailroom systems allow companies to improve the speed and accuracy of internal mail processing while reducing human error. In many cases, these new automated processes require little to no human intervention and result in significant cost savings. In a short time, it is possible that most large organizations will have fully automated mailroom systems, making the traditional mailroom a thing of the past.
Parascript is an established innovator in the Digital Mailroom industry with customizable solutions for mailroom processing. For more information contact the Parascript team today.