
Executive Summary
Every day, organizations receive high volumes of various types of documents through the mail, fax and email that launch different internal business processes. Reviewing and interpreting these documents, entering data from them, and forwarding them on to others for further processing consumes company time and resources, which increases operating costs and negatively impacts customer and supplier responsiveness. A digital mailroom powered by enterprise-level capture technology solves these problems by converting incoming mail, fax and email into structured electronic information that feeds multiple downstream business processes, systems and repositories across the enterprise. It does this using the enabling technologies of classification, separation, extraction, validation and delivery automation.
In almost every organization there are accounting, human resources, purchasing, contract management and customer service processes. In addition, there are vertical market-specific processes, such as insurance claims processing, mortgage processing, electronic health records management, new bank account opening, case management in government, and so on. In many cases an electronic infrastructure and electronic workflow are used to orchestrate the complex sequence of steps required to complete the process, but the process cannot start until the required information is captured from incoming business documents.
This white paper overviews how modern capture enabled business processes can transform traditional incoming document reception and processing into an efficient ”digital mailroom” that helps organizations reduce costs, drive process efficiency, and improve customer service and market competitiveness.