The mail center is the primary portal to the outside world for most organizations, and interfacing with the outside world is not always an easy undertaking. Information comes in a myriad of formats and from countless sources. Though these sources are usually an organization's partners, vendors and customers, a grim reality is that the possibility of hazardous materials and threats being sent through the mail is presenting even more challenges for many businesses and governmental organizations. In this age of bioterrorism and global political uncertainty, organizations not only face a tremendous challenge in processing mission-critical information accurately but also getting it into the right hands quickly and doing so with increased levels of security.
The traditional mail center 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 many times lost the traditional mail center has no means of processing electronic data.
E-mail systems aren't up to the job either. Paper continues to be the dominant medium for business communications, and e-mail that is received is grouped together and classified very generally as "e-mail" by software programs, regardless of form or content. A system is needed that can ensure mail is delivered safely, without impeding efficient delivery of essential communication.
The Solution to Traditional Mail Centers
Emerging software technology now offers a systematic virtual mail center that captures, classifies and delivers all critical information of an enterprise. The "virtual front door" captures information from paper or electronic sources, classifies it according to its content and an organization's business rules and delivers that information.
The technologies of a virtual center that can recognize, identify and route mail and document types, are predicted to be in high demand in the years to come, according to Harvey Spencer Associates and Strategy Partners, two independent industry analyst firms. The firms predict that the market for intelligent document classification software alone will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 36.7% from 2000 through 2005. They contend this niche will eventually be the fastest growing segment within the entire input management realm.
The heart of a virtual mail center is where information is classified; accomplishing in seconds what would typically take hundreds of hours to accomplish by hand. Most incoming mail is received in a semi-structured format. If it is identified as a form and it is routed to the deliver branch. If it is something other than a form, it undergoes a full-text analysis to determine its type and content. And once type is established, it's sent on to delivery.
Delivery occurs in multiple formats through multiple exports, depending on the type of data, addressing the complex needs of businesses that have more than one kind of content to export to more than one place. In addition, users can change format before delivery. Security settings can also be applied, and tracking and auditing settings keep tabs on every critical statistic of the various modules running within the system.
Increased Levels of Security
An important benefit of the virtual mail center, in addition to its cost reduction and quick delivery features, is the added layer of safety it provides. Almost three years after the deadly anthrax-laced letters were delivered in Washington, DC, it remains vital that governmental and private-sector organizations take every precaution necessary to ensure the safe delivery of mail. Even in this technological age, paper remains the dominant medium of communication between government and its constituencies and, therefore, paper needs to be safeguarded.
In addition to stopping hazardous materials from entering by digitizing paper communication, a digital mail center can quickly send an alert through the proper channels when written death threats or other harassing correspondence turns up. The technology can differentiate between threatening and standard phrases and then alert the proper authorities of potentially dangerous threats. The government is able to document threats and take steps to maintain safety.
None of these possible dangers can be taken lightly or ignored. This is one of the reasons why the national campaign to re-elect President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in 2004 is using an off-site location where the Imaging Acceptance Corporation (IAC) is accepting and processing all mail.
The mail, numbering 5,000 to 20,000 pieces per day, is opened in a biologically secure "safe room" and then scanned and converted to electronic content. Employing advanced optical character recognition (OCR) and text classification technology that will be used to "read" the digitized document to determine its nature, capture the sender's and recipient's contact information and route the document within IAC for any necessary data correction or completion. The technology will also monitor incoming mail for possible threats, which will be reviewed, prioritized and processed by IAC personnel. Finally, the system will be used to deliver digitized versions of the mail to the appropriate party at the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign via a private-network Web site for quick processing and response.
The digital mail center will ensure that each piece of mail sent to the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign is processed safely, quickly and accurately and that the desires of each supporter are met in the fastest time possible.
Virtual Mail Centers Are Imminently Needed
The need for a centralized, automated mail center has never been more acute. If excessive paper-handling costs can be drastically reduced while ensuring the safety of mail recipients, then there could possibly be a vast increase in efficiency and security for entire mailing systems, both within and between enterprises.
Large, multi-national organizations regard the development of a digital mail center defined as a solution to capture and process all incoming documents, regardless of their content, format or point of origin as critical to their success in the years ahead, but are uncertain about how to progress this desire from the drawing board to implementation, according to Byline Research.
The study, based on a survey of global financial services organizations, finds the development of an integrated input management solution for ever-growing volumes of paper and electronic information is key to improved efficiency and cost reduction, as well as to the strategic goals of more responsive customer service and better management control. Those surveyed conveyed that they no longer regard such document capture and management processes as an operational chore, but instead view it as a competitive competency.
Most organizations today recognize the need to take a unified approach to the management of incoming paper and electronic media and plan to implement some sort of digital mail center technology in the near future. Nearly two-thirds (64%) regard the digital mail center as strategically important and 22% believe it to be critical to their ability to compete effectively. The primary benefit expected from a digital mail center is its ability to reduce the time that is required to get information from the mail center to the appropriate workgroup or person. Automatic routing of scanned documents and reduced paper handling were also cited as key objectives by 50% and 48% of respondents, respectively.
Best practice virtual mail centers should be completely scalable and adjust easily to the ever-fluctuating volumes of incoming information. Implementing a digital mail center would provide improved security, reduced processing costs, ensured capture of business-critical information and quick delivery of time-sensitive data to streamline business practices. The concept essentially changes how information is collected, disturbed and utilized. The virtual mail center is designed to substantially reduce delays, communication bottlenecks, overflowing in-boxes and the threats and potential dangers that can enter through the traditional mail center.
Jim Vickers is the chief marketing officer for Captiva Software Corporation. He has more than 20 years of sales and marketing management experience. You can contact him at jvickers@captivasoftware.com.
