The intelligent data capture of incoming information is critical to the success of any organization. Vital information lies within incoming documents. Yet, the process of sorting, capturing and delivering this information can be time-consuming and expensive. Despite the increase in electronic communication, many organizations still rely on information from paper documents. Organizations of all sizes still receive huge volumes of inbound mail. The traditional solution of manually filing these paper documents and distributing to staff, that may be dispersed across many locations, is no longer viable in a modern business.

The traditional mailroom isn’t up to the job. In addition to being slow—piles of paper are sluggishly, erratically pushed into the workflow, with crucial information being trapped, delayed, and oftentimes lost—the traditional mailroom also has no means of processing electronic data. Competitive businesses are calling out for an automated solution for all incoming information, a virtual “single point of contact” that can classify and route all incoming correspondence, regardless of its medium or point of origin. CDIT’s Digital Mailroom Solutions answers that call.

CDIT’s Digital Mailroom Solutions are designed to automate not only traditional mailroom procedures, but also the entire information process, creating a virtual “front door” to enterprise information systems. The Digital Mailroom provides a single point of entry and centralized processing for all input: incoming paper mail, faxes, e-mail, digital office documents and online communications streams. It’s able to automatically recognize and route these documents to the appropriate department or person, and run full auditing and tracking, resulting in the following key benefits:

• Lower operational costs through reduced dependence on manual processes, both in the mailroom and throughout the enterprise.
• Increased efficiency throughout the workflow through the automatic prioritization and routing of mission-critical information.
• Improved accuracy throughout the information flow, and the accountability of information systems by initiating high-level tracking and auditing functionalities

The Key Functions of an Effective Digital Mailroom Solution
Approximately 80% of the information used by an organization is in unstructured documents such as correspondence, but until recently automatic processing was limited to documents with a fixed structure, such as forms. Whatever the structure, the information must be accurately and appropriately processed to enable successful business transactions and regulatory compliance.

The ability to automatically extract that information into a business workflow brings the promise of driving business even faster.

Following are the key functions of an effective Digital Mailroom Solution:

• Ingestion of both hardcopy and electronic documents. Documents can be efficiently recognized and managed regardless of type (invoices, contracts, purchase orders, reports, general correspondence, etc.) or format (paper, faxes, XML, electronic documents, etc.).
• Automatic classification of documents by content. Documents can be routed to the correct target business process or workflow queue without the need for pre-sorting, reducing document handling costs.
• Automatic separation of multi-page documents. Batches of multi-page documents can be scanned without inserting pre-printed separator sheets between them, eliminating printing costs and reducing batch preparation time.
• Automatic indexing of documents. Rich index data can be captured with greatest consistency from every document, dramatically reducing the need for costly manual keying and enabling powerful search for the retrieval of captured information and documents
• Automatic capture of data from documents. Business processes can be expedited and transactions initiated automatically, resulting in reduced processing time, lower operational costs and increased productivity. Now straight-through processing is as much a reality for paper as it is for web and electronic forms.