Organizations today face huge mailroom challenges with the wide variety in formats of incoming information.
Despite the growth of digital channels supposedly making information-handling easier, the reality is that now customers and businesses use a greater range of channels to communicate. Most businesses still handle a lot of paper, fax messages are still present, email is on a steady rise, and additionally social streams and online information are growing in significance.
This growth in the number and types of information channels creates an added level of complexity for businesses, and new challenges: How do you handle all channels in one process? Can you standardize the inputs from each channel? How do you ensure consistent service levels independent of the channel or format of the communication?
Solving the mailroom problem: Multichannel Process Automation
Addressing these mailroom challenges requires both good process and the right tools to make this a reality.
I firmly believe a multichannel process automation (MPA) solution is the best approach to turn mailroom struggles around. MPA allows inputs from multiple formats into the same processing platform, and it enables the modular addition of converters for most information types.
What a multichannel process automation solution does is normalize all of these inputs and ensures the optimal amount of data is taken from every input type and taken to the next process steps. Of course you can design these processes to fit the exact needs of your business.
With the automated input entry, standardized processes regardless of the format and control of the process design – you are best positioned to achieve the highest possible rates of ‘straight-through processing’ for simple documents, leaving you time to focus resources on the exceptions and more complex incoming documents. The solution is totally scalable to fit any size of business.
I recommend you read more about automating your mailroom in this dedicated information portal on our website. There you can also read about the remarkable achievements of German publisher Spiegel, which using our Lexmark multichannel process automation, reduced mailroom handling times from several weeks down to a maximum of one working day.
Further complexities
Of course no two organizations are the same, and it’s worth mentioning some of the additional capabilities that offer solutions to some common issues that many organizations today face.
Distributed environments: If your business is spread over multiple sites, even multiple countries – the Lexmark multichannel solution is designed to handle these added challenges. We track processes end-to-end – across sites, including mobile environments and also physical work tasks, so everything is easily centralized with an automation solution like ours. Different or new sites are simply added from a control panel which ensures load balancing. Disaster Recovery is also made easy too.
Increased customer demands: We know that customer expectations have increased markedly in recent years, and your response times need to be the best in the business. To help you with this challenge our MPA solutions are all based on a production platform which tracks service levels and ensure that any bottlenecks are identified well in advance. Administrators and operational management alike have unique monitoring tools (thick client or mobile versions), allowing them to not just track issues, but to immediately resolve them.
I hope you found this post useful – and don’t forget – you can read and learn more here on our website.