What is a Digital Mailroom?

A “digital mailroom” automates the full range of processes that would ordinarily otherwise be performed by your mailroom staff -- except without the need for mailroom staff, or even, for that matter, a mailroom. Digitizing your incoming mail is an important and reassuringly simple step toward digital transformation, which is where at least 98% of all businesses are heading in any event. It improves workplace efficiency, precision, and transparency, as we explain here. By rendering mail essentially “location-agnostic,” a digital mailroom supports the seemingly inevitable transition to remote work culture, not to mention the culture of corporate sustainability.

How it works

The process begins with a simple one-time instruction to the United States Postal Service to forward your incoming mail to one of 70 designated Exela processing centers, which instruction can be implemented in as few as 7 to 10 days and is reversible any time at your discretion. Thereafter, for as long as you wish to continue with the service, Exela receives your mail and uses state-of-the-art technology (including OCR-powered data extraction and proprietary AI-powered scanning for which we were recently awarded a patent) to intelligently digitize, index, and sort the content. The digitized content is then securely e-routed to the intended recipients. At the same time, it is also now immediately available for entry into all your workflows that utilize digital content.

Join us as we follow a piece of incoming paper mail through the Digital Mailroom process here.

Why Exela’s Digital Mailroom?

Exela’s Digital Mailroom happens to feature one of the world’s fastest scanning platforms. In fact, there’s virtually no faster way to digitize and route incoming documents. With 70 Exela processing centers around the world that support Exela’s Digital Mailroom activities, you can choose a center that’s convenient in case you ever want to pop in to pay your paper mail a visit.  In addition to digitizing your incoming mail, Exela’s Digital Mailroom can be used to digitize, index, and route paper records, including backlog, into the appropriate hands, as well any number of automated workflows (for example, medical records management).

Here’s a quick video tour through Exela’s Digital Mailroom.

Why it’s right for your law firm

A crown jewel in the Exela Smart Office suite of solutions, Exela’s Digital Mailroom has been particularly helpful to our law firm customers. Some reasons why include:

• Automatic digitization of content that for use in drafting.
• Establishing a firmwide source of truth about a particular client or matter.
• Entry of digitized content into legal industry-specific automated work flows such as these four you definitely want to know about.
• Supports faster response times to conflict-of-interest inquiries.
• Supports firmwide search capabilities for fast and informed answers to queries.
• Automated redaction commands, including batch redaction for enhanced security requirements, including “Chinese Walls.”

Learn how Exela’s Digital Mailroom was a game-changer for this large L.A.-based law firm during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As part of our continuing education program for our employees, Exela offers enterprise-wide biweekly seminars on topics of current interest that pertain to our business. Lately, the focus has been on all things related to how we can help businesses tap into the inherent (and often, untapped) value of their enterprise data. Most recently, the focus was on “Information Governance,” which is crucial to any business’s plan to manage their enterprise information. This particular seminar featured a roundtable discussion featuring four of Exela’s leaders in information governance:

• Saleem Ahmed, Vice President Business Strategy (SME)
• Peter Caporal, Vice President Portfolio Management
• Matt Crumrine, Vice President Business Development
• Michael Marinelli, Client Engagement Director

The discussion, facilitated by Salar Salahshoor, our Director of Product Marketing, was fascinating, and employees have been talking about it ever since. Because the discussion touched on proprietary information and strategy, we can’t share the video or transcript. But because information governance is such an important topic—and seemingly so misunderstood—we felt it would be a disservice not to share what we can. We hope you find it as illuminating as we did:

What is information governance?

The term “information governance” refers to an enterprise’s overarching policy for handling all information in any form that is received from any source or generated by the enterprise, with the end game being the optimization of that information (i.e. maximizing value while mitigating risk associated with the information).

But hasn’t information governance always been part of the business landscape?

Information governance begins with the age-old truism that information is the lifeblood of any business. That’s as true today as it ever was. However, in the past, copying important documents for members of one’s working group and maintaining paper files in cardboard boxes for the length of time required by applicable laws, rules, and regulations could pass as an adequate form of “information governance.” Thanks to the digital revolution, information is now generated and received in mind-boggling volume, at mind-boggling speed, and in disparate forms. Not all information rises to the level of “Big Data,” but the volume and velocity at which information is generated and received in the current landscape, as well as the speed at which business is now conducted, demands a disciplined enterprise-level approach to managing the value, utility, risks, and requirements posed by the data deluge.

What’s at stake?

An estimated 30% of enterprises would be forced to shut down within weeks of a catastrophic event that destroyed their paper records (e.g., fire, flood, earthquake), according to Exela’s Vice President of Global Strategy (SME), Saleem Ahmed. But the loss of any single document creates an estimated 25 hours of additional work in recreating the information contained therein, and even in the most mundane day-to-day operations, a typical employee spends as many as 400 hours per year to search for documents. Again, this isn’t exactly news to most C-Suite executives. In fact, more than half of all enterprises have identified “information governance” as the largest anticipated area of enterprise spending going forward, according Exela's Vice President of Strategy & Business Development, Matt Crumrine.

Seems simple enough; what’s the part that’s misunderstood?

As the digital world invents and reinvents itself on an ongoing basis, new buzzwords emerge, and old buzzwords develop new meanings. Information governance has emerged as a buzzword alongside “information management,” which is used somewhat interchangeably with “enterprise information management” (EIM), Enterprise Content Management (ECM), and Master Data Management” (MDM).

Both information governance and information management are concerned with the entire life cycle of information. However, “information governance” is a concept distinct from “information management.” We’ll be discussing information management in upcoming blogs. For now, our Enterprise Content Management Solutions, our Master Data Management Solutions, and our Big Data Analytics Solutions can provide a preview of what information management can do for your business.

The difference between “information governance” and “information management”

Whereas information governance addresses an enterprise’s overarching policies and strategies with regard to information, information management addresses how those policies and strategies are carried out within the enterprise. If information is the lifeblood of your business, then information management is your business’s circulatory system, while information governance is your business’s backbone. If you need help getting started on designing and implementing an information governance plan for your enterprise, Exela can help. Schedule a consultation today.