Digital Mailroom vs Traditional: Understanding the Advantages and Differences
"The world is constantly changing, and we must adapt and evolve with it."
An old adage—but never truer than in this day and age!
In an age of social media and 'always-connected' devices and 'always-online' profiles, your customers expect instant responses to their queries; it's no longer a question of hours or days—but almost down to the minute or even seconds.
There's a premium on speed and efficiency in business. The corporate mailroom is no exception. With tons of paper mail and an ever-increasing load of electronic mail, it's a task to sort out the most urgent messages and get hold of vital documents for immediate processing.
It doesn't help that some of the mail cannot be quickly routed via email to remote employees or vendors and partners who may be in different locations.
That's where the concept of a digital mailroom, also known as mailroom automation, has transformed how businesses sort, route, and process both paper and electronic mail.
In this article, we discuss how automation has changed traditional mailroom processes and given rise to digital mailrooms that bring speed, efficiency, and accuracy into email and document management.
RDS offers a digital mailroom service that is more than a high-speed scanning hub for incoming paper mail. It's a robust, modern mail management solution designed using intelligent capture software, data, and content from various sources.
Traditional mailroom processes
The traditional corporate mailroom is a central hub where all mail from private couriers or postal delivery is received and distributed to the intended departments, teams, managers and stakeholders.
How it works:
Mailroom attendants diligently sort out the daily mail and decide who should receive each parcel or envelope—and they're usually old hands, so they know the ins and outs of the process. But like any manual process, manual mail sorting is prone to errors.
What could go wrong:
There's always the chance that an important paper check that the Accounts team has been waiting for is buried under a pile of job applications that have poured in for a new vacancy.
And occasionally, a piece of mail will go missing—misplaced or delivered to the wrong recipient—never to be found again!
Plus, what about remote employees who can't receive paper mail on a daily basis? Or an employee who's traveling for work?
The bottom line is that traditional mailrooms can't provide real-time access to essential business information and don't have a solution for remote collaboration. Physical mail and paper documents require substantial storage space and incur high storage costs.
But then...
Traditional mailrooms were easy to set up and didn't require technology adoption or any special training. Naturally, the cost of setting up traditional mailrooms was low.
Traditional mailrooms served the purpose perfectly well—till digitization changed expectations and forced us to change operational processes.
Introducing the digital mailroom
A digital mailroom leverages enterprise scanning, data capture, and workflow management technologies to automate mail processing.
RDS offers an outsourced digital mailroom management service. We begin by setting up a dedicated PO Box for your company.
We pick up your daily mail, digitize, process and distribute it to your employees—seamlessly, every day.
How it works:
Document scanning: We scan all your incoming paper mail at the point of entry and convert it to digital formats. Our state-of-the-art high-speed scanning equipment ensures fast speed and high-quality digital output in standardized formats.
Document capture technologies (OCR): We use indexing rules (defined as per your operational needs) to categorize every document. Our advanced OCR software extracts key information like text, numbers and handwritten notes. Our intelligent capture technology helps classify each file accurately and deliver it to downstream business systems (CRM, ERP, DMS). All incoming information is searchable, and employees can find and retrieve information quickly.
Automated workflows: Once data is available for other processes, it triggers the next step in the workflow. We streamline these workflows, defining rules, policies, and procedures for the routing and electronic distribution of digital documents to the right departments and concerned people. Automated alerts notify the next person in the workflow as each step is completed. This reduces administrative delays and removes bottlenecks.
Document management: Digitized mail and documents are stored in a secure DMS for easy access and retrieval. Depending on your company's document retention policies, we may either send the physical originals to long-term storage facilities or destroy them and retain only the digital versions.
Digital mailroom benefits
Speed and efficiency: With a digitized mailroom, incoming mail and documents reach your employees faster since they are scanned immediately and routed electronically to the correct recipients. Since the digital copies are stored in a DMS, employees can access them instantly and from anywhere, allowing quick responses to urgent matters.
Enhanced accuracy and better tracking: Automated processing makes the sorting and classification of mail more accurate than physical handling and routing, which is prone to human error. Electronic distribution eliminates the risk of losing or misplacing documents. Digital correspondence and documents can be easily traced, reducing delays or disruptions.
Time and cost savings: Automating manual tasks releases your employees from mundane and time-consuming tasks, allowing them to spend their time more productively on high-value work. Digital documents eliminate or reduce the need for expensive storage space for archiving and storing documents.
Remote work and collaboration: Once your documents are securely stored in digital formats, they can be instantly accessed from anywhere. Advanced search and indexing features make them available at the click of a button and enable faster communication and collaboration.
Differences between a digital mailroom and traditional mailrooms
A digital mailroom or mail automation helps overcome the challenges of traditional mailrooms.
Let's compare digital and traditional mailrooms to highlight the key differences between them and highlight the reasons why companies must consider transitioning to mailroom automation.
Here's an easy comparative chart that you can read at a glance:
| Key Features | Traditional Mailroom | Digital Mailroom |
|---|---|---|
| Method |
Manual, person-dependent | Automated, rules-based |
| Processing speed | Slow | Fast |
| Retrieval | Difficult, time-consuming | Fast & easy with indexing and quick-search options |
| Storage | Requires significant physical storage space | Digital data stored in a DMS on-premises or on cloud |
| Data security | Security is limited to ensuring physical storage areas are access-controlled | Stringent access controls can be set at user-level or file-level, ensuring tighter data security |
| Compliance with document retention policies | Cumbersome, requires a lot of time & manual effort to check and comply with retention policies | Automatic with predefined rules for document retention and alerts for document expiry dates |
RDS: A complete, compliant, outsourced digital mailroom solution
Digital or electronic mailrooms provide real-time access to accurate information from anywhere. Digitizing incoming documents at source helps you respond faster to customers, improve turnaround time, and gain a competitive edge.
At RDS, our digital mailroom solution is based on advanced AI/ML technology that can automatically prioritize documents and 'understand' how each file should be handled and routed. As more mail is run through the process, the more “intelligent” the software becomes.
You can leave the entire mailroom cycle in our hands—from receiving and opening up your daily mail to digitizing, indexing, and routing it accurately, using intelligent process automation.
Our robust and powerful document management system allows employees to access the latest enterprise content from any location or device, enabling remote work and better collaboration between hybrid teams.
Ask RDS experts for a consultation today and see how a digital mailroom improves efficiency and helps you stay compliant.
RDS: A complete, compliant, outsourced digital mailroom solution
Digital or electronic mailrooms provide real-time access to accurate information from anywhere. Digitizing incoming documents at source helps you respond faster to customers, improve turnaround time, and gain a competitive edge.
At RDS, our digital mailroom solution is based on advanced AI/ML technology that can automatically prioritize documents and 'understand' how each file should be handled and routed. As more mail is run through the process, the more “intelligent” the software becomes.
You can leave the entire mailroom cycle in our hands—from receiving and opening up your daily mail to digitizing, indexing, and routing it accurately, using intelligent process automation.
Our robust and powerful document management system allows employees to access the latest enterprise content from any location or device, enabling remote work and better collaboration between hybrid teams.
Ask RDS experts for a consultation today and see how a digital mailroom improves efficiency and helps you stay compliant.