Tips on Mailroom Automation and Business Continuity

What does mailroom automation mean to you? Not so long ago, it would have conjured images of automatic letter opening equipment. However, the current meaning of the term could not be more different. Now the whole thrust of the message is about getting away from having paper in business processes. Organisations still receive reams of paper correspondence, forms and documents and will continue to do so for many years.

Balancing business needs and corporate compliance

The 'wet' signature still has huge significance for contracts and agreements – for most businesses, the deal isn’t done without ‘ink on paper’. So the pressure is now on to scan the incoming post and send the intended recipient an image, not the paper itself – while storing the image of that document securely, along with authentication that the image has not been tampered with or altered in any way. The advent of MiFID (An EU directive = Markets in Financial Instruments Directive) has big implications for banks and city firms in that it mandates BCP (Business Continuity Planning) to be a factor in achieving reasonable compliance. For large organisations that truly means getting away from paper, as in practice it is impossible to back up paper – unlike computer data.Increasingly post rooms (or mailrooms) have a high-volume scanner powered by the ubiquitous Kofax software and use the post room staff to classify images so they can be sent to the correct recipients. However things are moving beyond this step.

Post room automation: the next frontier

There is a new generation of post room tools that use the relatively new generation of recognition and classification software tools (an example would be Indicius from Kofax) to categorise the incoming documents automatically wherever possible.
Not only that but the software can now separate documents automatically. Until very recently the use of bar coded separation pages or patch pages was the only way of reliably telling the system that a new document was being processed.
In a few present -and all future - mailroom automation projects, the software will perform this function. The software works in various ways with various amounts of CPU overhead. Some recognition and classification techniques take a microsecond, others a fraction of a second and the most complex OCR-processes can take a few seconds, even on a high-powered server.

It is this classification and auto-indexing step that allocates each document to a specific workflow path, with recipient details extracted so that documents can be automatically routed to the right destination: purchase orders to the sales and manufacturing departments, invoices to finance, and so on. If the document management system can link to core business systems such as ERP or CRM, so much the better, as this can further automate and enhance processes.
Finally, all images and metadata extracted are released to a document image repository such as IBM Content Manager, Hummingbird DM or similar, to ensure security, safe archiving and auditability.

Reliability Matters

So far so good – but what about the reliability of the system? In a large organisation the mailroom system cannot and must not fail – it has to be available all the time. Lack of reliability should not be considered as acceptable as there are so many downstream consequences on customer service and potentially people sitting waiting for work. So the system must be set up with failover to a redundant server – either in a separate location, or in a secure hosting site away from the business.
In addition many financial organisations may want their network of locations linking to the mailroom making it into a communications hub for the business and in charge of the automated collection of documents submitted from the branches. Internet server-based scanning controlled from a single point is increasingly popular with larger financial services institutions.
It is the more far-sighted organisations that are now integrating automated response systems to customer communications. For example, a customer submits a form to switch accounts in a Rugby bank branch and within an hour is informed by an SMS message or email that the document has entered the process, has a reference number and tells them what the next step in the process will be.

Greater response automation acknowledging receipt of business documents, instructions or messages provides valuable reassurance to customers that their requirements are being listened to and fulfilled. This helps to drive real business benefit, not only improving customer service, but also boosting ROI of automation, by enabling staff to focus on more strategic activity.

Post perfect: a case in point

Deploying such systems is a specialised business and there are only a few people with both capability and experience. Williams Lea, now a subsidiary of Deutsche Post, handles the incoming post for four of the UK's largest insurance companies. The company has a resilient, automated post room that 'feeds' around 3,000 knowledge workers in various call centres. They have deployed Kofax as the spine of the mailroom automation and contracted Basware UK to provide the know-how to create a resilient Kofax processing environment to ensure incoming mail is available to all workers quickly.
This shows the scale that digital mailrooms can achieve, to boost efficiency and enhance customer service. As companies recognise and respond to the need to capture, track and control paper-based information – especially financial information – as soon as it touches them, there’s never been a better reason to start sorting business post more efficiently.

Lightening the logistics load

The demand for greater financial and mailroom efficiency extends beyond the finance department to areas such as sales and order processing. This approach has been adopted in a number of business environments – here we examine the route taken by one leading UK supplier and distributor of electronic and industrial components.

The company, which has over two million customers in 21 countries and supplies over four million products from 3000 manufacturing brands, wanted to extend the traditional accepted boundaries of the digital mailroom, integrating additional forms of business communication such as fax and email in order to create a more efficient and streamlined sales- and order-handling process.

With a network of distribution centres, and sales offices located throughout the UK and customer sales orders coming in via post, fax, email and phone, the company needed to develop an altogether more coherent and coordinated approach to managing order processing, ensuring effective customer relationship management and positioning the company so it could deal effectively with further growth in customer numbers and with future changes in the way they receive sales orders.

Combinations and permutations

Such a large database of UK and international customers, and a global network of suppliers to source their products from, meant there was an obvious business need for greater automation within the mailroom.

With over 80 million possible order permutations, the company needed a solution which would streamline and automate order handling, to speed up sales processing and remove any margin for error.

Greater automation would not only speed up the order handling process, it would also enable the organisation to coordinate ordering and dispatch processes more easily and effectively, thereby strengthening working relationships with suppliers and improving overall service levels to customers.

Previously: the Herculean data entry task

The existing business model was highly labour-intensive, with faxes being emailed at random to an operator, who then had to go through a total of seven manual inputting stages in order to fully process the order.

Firstly, the operator would check the fax image for additional data or requests and enter this information into the memo field, and then find and enter the customer account number. If this is missing, a manual search would need to be carried out to get the required customer data and account number.

In addition, the operator would also be required to locate and input the customer identity details and confirm shipping details, enter the purchase order number and verify that this is not a duplicate, and also enter any additional header data such as date of order.

Finally, the line item order code would be added to the email, and a cross-check carried out that the number of units and pricing match those on the document, before the order process could be completed and sent for dispatch.

Streamlining sales

The company enlisted the help of Basware UK to design and implement a data capture solution which would automate this procedure and create a single-stage handling process, speeding up the order handling process and minimising any margin for error and boosting overall efficiency.

Basware UK developed an end-to-end scanning solution which would import images from an email inbox, classify sales orders, carry out data capture, validate the data and then export the sales orders into the GIMPS/Orbit system using MQ Series client.

The company’s existing RIGHTFAX system has been configured to automatically send incoming faxes to an email account within the correct business department, where they are monitored and imported into the data capture environment.
Once here, the documents are automatically classified as sales orders or unknown documents. Sales orders are then further classified into specific customers, and detailed data capture is automatically carried out to extract the required data, which is then validated with an indexing tool and any missing data added.

Failsafe mailroom automation

A set of “releases rules” then determines whether the orders are released directly onto the Oracle system (via GIMPS), and a multi-page TIFF file is created for each document, and MQ Series Client used to pass an XML message containing the data for the document to the Orbit system.

Sales order documents that fail the release rules or which have been classified as unknown documents are forwarded to the company’s Siebel system for further manual processing. If individual documents have been rejected, rather than a whole batch, an email attachment is replaced by a TIFF image of the rejected document, to enable the order to be resolved more quickly and efficiently.

UK…Europe…the World

Initially introduced for just one customer, the pilot’s success led to it being expanded to more business customers in the UK, to streamline the ordering process and improve overall customer service delivery and speed of response.

The solution is now being used to handle sales orders from UK customers more effectively, and will also be extended and developed to automatically process European orders in the near future.

For this, Basware UK will create country-specific batch classes for incoming faxes and emails, and develop additional data capture and validation rules to enable documents to be indexed remotely. Furthermore, the data capture system will be converted to an ACIS or Citrix configuration, to ensure Europe-wide application.

Faced with the challenge of improving the speed of order processing and effecting greater coordination with suppliers across the globe, this UK distributor has succeeded in developing an advanced digital mailroom, a unified messaging centre for all business communications, which has streamlined administration and provided valuable traceability.

This case study is an example of how data capture solutions can be more effectively harnessed to address business needs. The solution has been successfully extended beyond the traditional scanning and indexing of inbound paper-based mail, to incorporate email and fax-based communications.

www.basware.co.uk or +44 (0)1606 331234