In an increasingly digital world, paper-based businesses are often at a disadvantage to competitors. From order fulfillment to grievances and employment applications, everything done on paper adds costs and slows down internal processes, generating confusion, creating unclear workflows, and increasing the risk of data entry errors and lost or misplaced documentation—all of which can compound into wasted work hours and sub-par customer service.
By contrast, when you implement mailroom scanning services you can reduce the amount of paper in your company, which automatically saves resource costs, significantly improves accessibility, shortens processing times, and increases efficiency across departments.
Digitization (starting with mailroom scanning) helps companies of all sizes make more profit with less effort. Let’s see how simple mailroom scanning services can help you increase efficiency in three major areas!
1. Mailroom Scanning Increases Process Efficiency
Traditional mail needs to be opened, sorted, prepared, and delivered to people in various offices. Employees pass paper documents from one department to another for approvals, signatures, and consultancy, generating workflows that are hard to track in real time.
Because of it, misplacing or losing documents (or even files full of them) can easily become part of the daily routine. A study by Software Advice revealed that workers in traditional offices waste six hours per week searching for paper documents alone—a task that often causes frustration and anxiety while significantly reducing productivity.
With mailroom scanning services, you can get processes started within one day of receipt, reduce the likelihood of misplaced documents, and have complete control over workflows, all with minimal manual work required. Documents can be tracked at any time and with workflow automation software you can electronically add notes as well, eliminating confusion and lost information along the review chain. You can finally say goodbye to attaching sticky notes to documents!
For example, CLEAResult is a company that conducts home energy assessments (HEA) for over 40,000 New England residents. Mailroom scanning helped the company to process files and deliver proposals 30 percent faster. CLEAResult’s mail and documents are prepped, scanned, and uploaded to the company’s workflow automation software in less than 48 hours of receipt. This allows the employees to process documents in three to five business days, instead of five to seven.
With a significantly reduced amount of repetitive tasks to perform, the back-office staff has more time to focus on value-added and analytical activities.
Therefore, mailroom scanning increases processing efficiency by:
- Improving the approval process
- Providing immediate and on-the-fly access to documents
- Tracking detailed workflows and statuses
2. Mailroom Scanning Optimizes Your Costs Efficiently
The cost of paper and related expenses add up to significant (and often unnecessary) sums. Take a look at these numbers:
- American companies spend over $120 billion a year on printed forms.
- For every 12 filing cabinets full of paper, you need an additional employee to manage the documentation.
- Each four-drawer filing cabinet occupies an average of nine square feet of floor space and costs $1,500 per year.
- A misfiled document costs $125, while lost documents can cost anywhere between $350 and $700 in employee time.
Rather than wasting valuable space by stacking boxes in-house – or paying a storage company to inventory, store, and maintain thousands of paper files – all of your documents can be stored digitally, improving accessibility while reducing the cost of paper-related materials and services as well.
For example, CLEAResult managed to completely remove 12 filing cabinets from their offices and eliminate the need to store overflow documents in an offsite warehouse. With our help, the company aims to eliminate the need for a records storage facility.
That means mailroom scanning optimizes cost efficiency by:
- Saving material costs on document printing, physical storage devices, and space
- Significantly reducing work hours previously needed to manage and transport documents
- Preventing additional costs like late fees or those incurred by lost documents
3. Mailroom Scanning Improves Archival Efficiency
Paper documents are difficult to archive because they require in-depth organization, space for storage, appropriate climatic conditions, and qualified staff to manage it all. Everything needs to be properly arranged to ensure control, transparency, and accessibility. Otherwise, audits are a nightmare for both auditors and employees.
On the other hand, when you digitize your documents with mailroom scanning, you automatically archive every piece of paper through the process of scanning and storing files within your digital document management system. Searching for old documents, preparing reports, and going through audits will take less time and will generate less stress for your staff members.
How Mailroom Scanning Works
Now that you know how mailroom scanning services create effective processes, take a look at how they allow you to maintain consistent workflows inside your company.
Here is how MetaSource implements mailroom scanning:
- We register a local P.O. box and receive your mail daily or weekly—the choice is yours.
- We open all mail and prepare it to be scanned by removing staples, unfolding documents, separating pages, etc.
- We scan each document and control the quality of every image.
- We capture and index each document based on your identification needs.
- We securely deliver digital documents to you within 24 hours for immediate processing and archiving.
- Digital documents can kick off an automated workflow for streamlined processing and decision making.
Mailroom Scanning Services for Improved Efficiency
As a business owner or manager, you likely know how much technology has changed the way modern business is done. Processes like planning, managing projects, hiring new people, communicating with business partners and customers have all become easier thanks to its efficiency and accessibility—and taking advantage of it has never been simpler.
Mailroom scanning is a great way to eliminate paper while maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of your review process. You can save thousands of dollars a year, reduce turnarounds, provide better customer service, and make your employees happier and more productive, all with one simple service. Now that is efficient!