Assess your current mailroom processes to make your digital transformation seamless

Digitizing the mailroom is a major step toward the dream of a paperless office. However, given that organizations process, sort, and deliver thousands of pieces of mail every week, making that transition can be a significant hurdle.

Digital mailroom solutions can make it much easier. You can build the infrastructure and processes necessary to convert physical mail into digital files and get them delivered fast. Our guide will help you ask the right questions about your current mailroom so you can find the best solution for your needs.

Assessing your current mail handling process

Before you choose a digital mail solution, it helps to analyze the processes your organization currently uses. By pinpointing areas where your mail team experiences the most friction, you can seek out the service that will have the most immediate impact.

Examine and evaluate these aspects of the mail-handling process:

• How mail arrives at the office: Is it delivered all at once, or are there multiple deliveries during the day? Where is mail received, and who receives it?
• The volume of mail: Do you only receive a few letters and packages in a week, or do you expect to receive hundreds of pieces every day?
• How mail gets sorted: Is mail sorted by department or employee? Do you use trays, buckets, or a larger shelving unit?
• How mail gets distributed: Are employees expected to visit the mailroom to pick up their mail, or do mailroom employees take the mail to them?
• Any additional processing: Are mailroom employees expected to open and process mail, or do other office staff handle that?

Once you have established how mail flows through your office, you can begin to determine how digital mailroom services can improve it.

Did You Know?:If your organization has multiple locations, our remote distributed scanning solutions reduce the need for costly shipments while increasing efficiency.

Identifying inefficiencies in traditional mail management

Every mailroom operates in a way that makes sense for the organization, which means each one will have its own processes and pain points. However, there are a few common areas where mailrooms tend to experience the most issues that digital mailroom solutions can improve.

• Inefficient sorting processes: Hand sorting large volumes of mail by department or employee name can be a significant bottleneck in timely delivery.
• Long delivery times: Lengthy sorting times can cause unnecessary delays in delivery. Also, some organizations with distributed offices across a neighborhood or large city rely on a centralized mailroom in one location to deliver mail to these secondary locations by truck. This process introduces multiple externalities, like traffic jams and car accidents, that can cause significant delays.
• Handling errors: If a mailroom clerk accidentally mis-sorts a piece of mail, it can end up with the wrong recipient — potentially at a location miles away from the mailroom.
• Lack of accountability: Some analog mailroom processes have accountability baked in. For example, you can generally look up who worked on a particular day or was assigned to a specific route to find out who handled certain pieces of mail. However, this approach lacks the granularity of digital mailroom services, meaning you won’t have complete visibility and accountability for who processed or sorted what.

Evaluating current costs and security risks

In addition to analyzing the roadblocks your mailroom encounters, you must also consider costs and potential security risks.

Expenses like the labor required to process and deliver the mail you receive, the cost of supplies, and the purchase and upkeep of equipment like vehicles and sorting machines all add up over time. By streamlining many of these processes and reducing the expensive equipment you need to maintain, digital mailroom costs can potentially be much lower than traditional mailrooms.

Additionally, you need ways to keep physical mail safe from thieves — which means installing physical locks and security cameras, and possibly even hiring security guards to watch over mailrooms overnight. Physical mail can also be easily lost or misplaced, potentially leading to accidental exposure of sensitive data.

That’s not to say that digital mailrooms don’t have their own security risks to overcome. However, digital mailroom solutions offer much greater insight and control into how you secure your documents and provide automated ways to safeguard data through encryption protocols and user access controls.

Choosing the right digital mailroom solutions

A digital mailroom should make sorting and processing mail seamless. After all, if it takes more effort to digitize and process mail than doing the same tasks by hand, you’ve only traded one problem for another. To avoid these issues and set your organization up for success, keep the following digital mailroom features in mind while you’re doing your research.

Key features to look for in a digital mailroom service

• Hardware and software integration: Digital mailrooms are at their most harmonious when you pair document scanners with compatible imaging software. That way, you can rest assured that scanned mail looks sharp and ends up exactly where it needs to be. Be sure to look for digital mailroom solutions that offer deeper integration so they’ll synchronize with any other tools and platforms your organization uses.
• Optical character recognition (OCR): OCR is the backbone of your digital scanning process. This powerful technology can read typed and handwritten text from scanned mail and extract it for use throughout operations. Rather than hand-delivering mail, OCR lets you grab the text, digitize it, then upload it to finance software or CRMs, embed it into emails, and much more.
• Workflow automation: Rather than routing scanned mail by hand, workflow automation software like PaperStream Capture Pro will do the heavy lifting for you. Set up processes to tag digital files, upload them to the correct folder within digital storage, and even set up task flows for additional processing.
• Robust security and compliance features: Automation can also help your team align its processing and storage standards with your industry's necessary security and data privacy standards. Many digital mailroom solutions also include encryption and user access management functionality to protect sensitive data and keep unauthorized users away from your mail.
• Scalability: Digital mailrooms should easily adapt to increasing or seasonal workloads, whether you have a few dozen pieces of mail to scan or thousands. Look for services that make it easy to add more hardware or storage if you need more help.

Did You Know?:Ricoh’s fi Series scanners make document management simple, thanks to high-resolution image quality and accurate OCR software features.

Comparing cloud-based vs. on-premises solutions

Just like physical paperwork, you must store your digital mail scans somewhere. Generally, organizations handle this in one of two ways: on-premises or in the cloud. Both solutions have benefits and drawbacks, so choose the one that best fits your needs.

Training employees and optimizing workflows

While some analog processes might carry over into a digital mailroom, many employees will be experiencing this technology for the first time. Here are some tips to ensure your staff gets up to speed quickly.

Best practices for onboarding staff

• Align training to standard operating procedures (SOPs): Consistency is key in the mailroom. Devise a set of SOPs for common activities like signing for packages, gathering mail, processing it, and managing the software. Then, create a training program and documentation that hits all of these key points.
• Train the trainers: Training each new employee yourself is inefficient. Instead, designate one or a few employees to be designated trainers on SOPs and have them act as your instructional team. This will allow new hires to get onboard quickly and reinforce concepts with current employees.
• Make security and compliance a priority: Failing to meet data security and privacy standards can have major consequences for your organization, so ensure you’re imparting the gravity of the situation to new hires. If you’re baking these processes into your SOPs, it will be much easier for employees to transform them into muscle memory as they complete their daily workloads.

Continuous monitoring and improvements

A mailroom has a lot of moving parts. That’s why it’s always important to constantly review and update internal processes to keep what’s working and fix what isn’t.

For example, check in with new hires every 30 days for the first few months. Use this opportunity to find out if they still have trouble using the digital scanners or software. If many new hires are experiencing issues with the same procedures, consider revisiting your training processes to smooth out any wrinkles.

Also, schedule regular re-training sessions to keep critical information, like data security and compliance, top of mind. Doing so will help you mitigate any unnecessary incidents before they happen.

Transitioning to a digital mailroom solution? We can help

Digitizing your mailroom is no easy task. However, Ricoh is here to help make sure you get the most out of your transition. We have decades of experience helping organizations like yours find scanning and software solutions that make quick work of mail, records, and any other documents you need digitized. We’ll work with you to find digital mailroom solutions that align with your current processes and make them run better than ever.

Want to learn more? Contact us today to book an assessment, and we’ll help you get started on your digital transformation journey.

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