Challenges

Sorting incoming mail and inserting into mail boxes or delivering by hand is a very manual and time consuming exercise. Mail can get lost or delivered to the wrong individual or recipients may be on holiday or off sick. Receiving a letter and delivering it to a recipient does not necessarily mean that it will get dealt with in a timely manner. Monitoring this can be very difficult and delays or oversights in dealing with certain correspondence could have disastrous consequences.

Managing incoming mail with Diraq

Converting a mailroom to a digital mailroom requires change to processes as well as introduction of new hardware and systems. Mail has to be opened and scanned and this may be a major obstacle within some organisations. However, there is no reason why this cannot be introduced on a department basis first and then rolled out company wide over time. The benefits though are enormous.Once scanned most incoming post can be simply boxed in chronological order and when full sent offsite for less expensive storage. Some documents, such as birth or marriage certificates will need to be returned and so there has to be a procedure for this.Letters can then be delivered electronically to the recipients. Our automatic indexing feature greatly reduces the amount of manual indexing but those letters that have to be manually indexed are done in a similar way to sorting mail only using the system. Once indexed, then instead of the correspondence being delivered or collected manually it appears in the recipients In Tray or Queue. These Queues can be associated with individuals or teams (departments) and 'traffic Lights' provide an instant view for monitoring work in progress.

Consider these benefits:

• Incoming mail placed on a queue that is associated with an individual or team and is monitored
• Quicker review of correspondence through efficient document routing to the correct staff.
• Improved customer service level by providing staff with instant access to incoming mail and related documentation for supporting any subsequent telephone enquiries or email.
• Better use of expensive office space by eliminating the need for bulky filing cabinets
• Ability to share documents without the need of photocopying.
• Improve security and integrity of confidential documentation.
• Collates customer related documents into a 'virtual' file providing instant history.
• Traffic lights provide management with a visual overview of the status of work in progress by customer and staff member.
• Can be interfaced with existing systems providing document retrieval (display) facilities, importing of relevant data for verification/indexing use or exporting of meta-data for import into other systems.
• Letters cannot be lost or tampered with.

Strategic benefits of deploying Diraq

The 'Digital Mailroom' supports all the other activities that Diraq specialises in and provides organisations with ability to streamline their core business with interfaces to or from other systems without the need to process paper. Savings can be made by reducing the need to keep filing cabinets and freeing up valuable office space for other more important use or for 'downsizing'. Some companies have opted to outsource their digital mailroom and all incoming correspondence is sent direct to a third party (using a special Post Code) who scan and index the documents directly into the Diraq system. Scanning all incoming mail means that documents are not going to go missing, cannot be tampered with and in the event of a disaster, fire or flood, can be fully recovered to providing ongoing business support.