We continue to feel the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic across the globe. While many of us are at different stages in the journey and trying to navigate the road to recovery efficiently, companies are trying to figure out the future of the working world. 

One thing that's clear: remote working has to be flexible and virtual for both employees and employers. 

Remote working has already become an integral part of the new working world. For employees, finding a balance between their professional and personal aspirations is non-negotiable. As for employers, they benefit from a bigger talent pool, controlled costs, carbon savings, global expansion, and a lot more. 

Yet there are still some questions that remain unanswered:

What should be the extent of this flexibility? 

How do businesses ensure productivity is unhampered? 

What should the new policies and protocols include?

Why Remote Work is the Future

As we are moving out of the pandemic, some changes are here to stay, like remote working! For both employees and employers, remote working seems much more favorable than onsite working. This is mainly because of its positive effect on productivity, reduced costs, and positive environmental impact. 

There are mixed opinions on the subject – some businesses do not wish to continue their remote work policy after the pandemic, while others want to continue working remotely and flexibly. 

The shift to remote working was not at all planned, but over time, remote working practices evolved. Remote workers adapted to new tools and technologies to collaborate, learned new ways to communicate, and balanced working in personal spaces. 

However, building a functional remote working infrastructure across your company is a significant undertaking. Therefore, companies must invest more in understanding the robust corporate culture to establish a well-structured work-from-home approach.

Remote Working Trends and Policies 

The big question on productivity 

Under normal circumstances, most workers would commute to their offices. Not only was this time-consuming, but factors like transportation costs, safety, and weather would also play a role.  

Now, having the freedom to work from home gave employees more time. Also, having a gradual start to the day and not having to deal with the morning rush kept their moods brighter. Businesses noticed there was no adverse effect on productivity; instead, they experienced an improvement in deliverables. A win-win for all! 
 

Freedom and responsibilities 

A growing number of employees have developed a preference for remote working. This preference included not only working from home but from other locations as well, giving them increased freedom. In a recent survey, Flexjobs found that 65 percent of respondents wanted to become full-time remote employees post-pandemic, while 31 percent preferred hybrid arrangements.

Studies suggest that employees working from home are 47% more productive. Hence the employees proved remote and hybrid working did not affect their productivity and that their commitment to work and deliverables remained strong. Now, we are seeing a boost in remote working jobs and infrastructure expansion to facilitate opportunities for making remote working accessible to a broader pool of employees who see value in relocating and working remotely from one or more different locations. 

 

New Work-from-home Policies & Practices 

Business leaders need to set clear and defined business goals in order to establish effective remote and hybrid working conditions for their employees. 

Companies must also reflect on their remote work practices, HR policies, and hiring practices. Short-term remote working will not help attract or retain employees. Instead, companies need to plan for the long term and reset their business plans, corporate culture, and strategies accordingly.

What are your thoughts on remote working? If you are looking for smart solutions to assist you and your employees, Exela can make a difference. With solutions such as DrySign, which can help speed-up the approvals and sign-off process, Digital Mailroom, which allows quick access to physical mail from anywhere, and more.

Contact us, and one of our experts can guide you through our remote working solutions.   

For decades, businesses with multiple locations faced the challenge of finding better ways to connect their offices so that processes run seamlessly. Smart office technology plays a large role in this seamless connectivity. Once the pandemic hit and ushered in lockdown protocols, the need for connection between multiple locations increased since many employees were now working from home.

Today, we've seen the benefits of working from home and many businesses are choosing to be entirely remote or work on a hybrid system. Given that remote work is here to stay, it's time to take a close look at what smart office technology can do today to connect multiple locations.

Streamlining Multi-Location Systems

Organizations with multi-locations may struggle with a lack of standard operating procedures (SOPs) between locations. Before any smart technology is implemented, it's a good idea to create SOPs all locations can follow. This way, locations can work seamlessly, both independently and together, if any employees need to collaborate. 

SOPs will be necessary for smart technology that's put into place as well. This way, leaders can confirm that employees are using the technology effectively and appropriately. Another benefit of SOPs is that they are useful when training new hires. 

The industry the business is in, the size of the business, and the budget will determine what technology to implement first. Businesses also need to consider what areas of the company they would like to focus on. There are a lot of factors that come into play when implementing smart office technology. Before you begin your research, investigate any issues that result from a disconnection between locations.

Connecting with Smart Office Technology

Once smart office technology is put into place, companies can experience continuity across the business regardless of location, providing consistency for both employees and customers. With smart office technology, workflows can be more easily streamlined and optimized, resulting in increased productivity. 

Here are a few examples of smart office technology you can implement into your business:

Cloud-Based Technology

Many businesses have implemented cloud-based technology, whether it's through Google Drive, a cloud-based telephone system, or an e-signature platform like Exela’s DrySign. 85% of enterprise businesses are expected to adopt a cloud-first approach by 2025. With many cloud-based options being extremely cost-effective, it's no surprise that cloud technology is rapidly being executed in businesses.

Cloud-based technology is becoming a must-have in business due to its many applications and the fact that it allows for easy collaboration and sharing. Global companies now have the ability to share documents, standard procedures, and corporate information across the world with their employees.

Virtual Private Network (VPN)

Working effectively in different locations can be challenging when each location has its own network. This is where virtual private networks, or VPNs, come into play. VPNs create a secure and private network for employees to easily share data. On top of that, VPNs transfer information quickly and are cost-effective.

Shipping and Receiving Services

Another great way for business locations to connect is through smart office technology that streamlines the shipping and receiving service. Confusion can occur with shipments when there are multiple buildings that require mail and package delivery, creating headaches for business leaders and employees. With solutions like ExelaShip and ExelaTrack, companies have access to real-time status information about packages being delivered, packages that were received, and packages that are being shipped. With ExelaTrack, once a package is received, it can be tracked until it gets to the recipient, reducing lost packages inside the office.

Another great feature of ExelaTrack is the ability to track inventory between locations. If you find that one location is out of stock of a product but the other location has plenty, companies can then consolidate between the locations rather than purchasing new and possibly unnecessary inventory.

Connecting the Virtual with the Onsite

Some businesses may find that their onsite locations are streamlined well, but workflows falter with offsite employees. For example, companies may be struggling to determine how to deliver mail to remote or hybrid employees, transfer important physical documents, or exchange items with coworkers. With many businesses looking for solutions to promote remote working, it's important to determine how remote workers can have easy access to their mail and other deliverables.

There are two technologies that can help with this particular problem: smart lockers and a digital mailroom.

Smart Lockers

A smart locker solution like Exela’s Intelligent Lockers allows workers to easily receive packages, store their belongings, and exchange important documents and items. This solution is especially great for any office that employs a hoteling system or for offices that have hybrid workers. Smart lockers provide a clear and easy way for employees to access items they need when they're able to come into the office.

Digital Mailroom

Exela’s Digital Mailroom solution digitizes all incoming mail and other documents, uploading them to a cloud and making sure the correct recipient receives them. Handling employees' mail, especially that of remote workers, can be extremely challenging; this is where smart office technology really steps in. A digital mailroom will not only help remote workers but also onsite workers as coworkers can easily share mail and collaborate on documents digitally with other coworkers.

Conclusion

There are many smart office technologies that exist to help businesses connect multiple locations and to connect virtual and onsite working environments. We no longer live in a world where we need to mail every important piece of document from one location to another. If you're finding it difficult to determine the right technology for your business, contact us at Exela and we'll be happy to help your business with its digital transformation strategy.

In our advanced tech-inclined world, it’s more important than ever for your business to evolve with changing technologies. A digital mailroom is one of these technologies that allows businesses to view their postal mail from anywhere in the world.

Here's How Digital Mailroom Works

Exela's Digital Mailroom is a cloud-based solution that offers end-to-end workflow management and enables organizations to streamline the intake and distribution of mail. Digital Mailroom incorporates state-of-the-art technology for intelligent data extraction, scanning, indexing, routing, and secure archiving. We do it all while ensuring high data protection and encryption levels in transfer, transit, and rest. 

Incoming business mail is forwarded to one of Exela's 28 SSAE-18-certified mail processing centers in the US for offsite processing. Here we open and digitize all mail pieces and transmit them to the Digital Mailroom Portal. 

Scanning and digitizing make your mail more easily accessible and enables simplified sharing with colleagues, collaborators, and even internal automated systems. The mail is processed for routing within 24 working hours of receipt, ensuring there is no delay for customers in accessing their mail. Streamlining mail through Digital Mailroom can benefit your business in many ways, most important being: 

• Greater efficiency and process control
• Faster mail routing 
• Elimination of manual errors while sorting or indexing
• Easier accessibility 
• Full integration with downstream workflows
• Enhanced visibility and reporting
• Superior information management
• Improved customer service
• Improved compliance and data security 
• Full audit trails and chain of custody

Choosing the Right Digital Mailroom Solution for Your Business

When digitizing your mailroom, it’s essential to consider the options based on your company’s needs. For example, how you answer some of the following questions might affect the solution you choose:

• How distributed is the receipt of mail across your organization?
• What would be a suitable location from which to route mail?
• What should be done with original hard copy paper documents after they’re digitized?
• What is the volume of documents through the post?
• Do you receive cheque payments through the post? 
• What are your current policies regarding third-party process outsourcing? 

Exela’s Digital Mailroom processes all documents in highly secure facilities that include video surveillance, badge access restrictions, and biometric scanners at data centers. These processing centers are secured for regulated and classified equipment, hold-open door alarms, and additional security measures. All data is stored in encrypted formats, and access to information is restricted based on a need-to-know segregated-duties basis. 

How Digital Mailroom Can Improve your Customer Service and Productivity

Digital Mailroom offers a unique way to ensure your services are always excellent and productivity improves. Let's find out how.

Easy Access to Critical Data

Exela's DMR portal is cloud-hosted. This gives you instant access to digital mail, and you can receive your mail wherever and wherever you are. Furthermore, you can choose to forward, recycle, or shred the mail entirely, which prevents unnecessary interruptions by trips to the mailroom or having to visit a central headquarters.

Reduced Costs

Digital Mailroom lowers your operating costs in several important ways. The most apparent is through the increased efficiency and reduced fixed costs that come with eliminating in-house mailroom services. DMR effectively increases productivity while reducing labor costs.

Further savings come from replacing physical storage with cloud-based digital storage. Digitizing your incoming business mail allows you to not only reduce the square footage dedicated to document storage (often in expensive real estate), but enable easier and more cost-effective digital sharing, as opposed to costly and time-consuming physical delivery.

Switching to a digital mailroom also means reduced overhead costs on supplies, paper materials, equipment maintenance, and other document management costs.

Faster Processing Ensures Speedy Responses

Digital mail solutions will allow you to merge your incoming mail with your digital document and information stream at the earliest point. This essentially streamlines the front-end of critical business functions, from accounts receivable to invoices and any other operations processes that require external inputs. By centralizing all inbound information, you can improve turnaround times, standardize processes, optimize workflows, and reduce manual errors.

Well Organized Mail Distribution

When you partner with a digital mailroom service, you'll be handing off the burden of organizing your mail, placing it in the hands of the mailroom operator. Digital Mailroom providers like Exela specialize in creating mailroom tools and workflows to ensure efficient mail processing, accurate mail routing, and prompt electronic delivery.

Digital Mailroom operators create unique mail IDs or barcode labels for each mail item, allowing for easy monitoring throughout the delivery process. This is an essential feature when dealing with sensitive documents and checks.

Enhances Your Security and Data Privacy

While digital data breaches and leaks may be top of mind when it comes to information security, it’s easy to forget that paper documents pose their own risks as well. If a document with sensitive information is accidentally delivered to the wrong place, misfiled, or left out in the open, it can be very easy for someone without proper clearance to view. Physical documents stored in unsecured filing cabinets can be easily accessed with no trace of who viewed them, when, or how many times. 

Digitizing your documents and paper mail allows for greater security and tracking, ensuring your sensitive information is protected and accounted for. Exela’s DMR mail centers meet or exceed the HIPAA, HITRUST, SSAE-18, SOC-2, and Veracode security standards, for a reliably secure digitization process. Once documents are digitized, we implement role-based data access, document classification and content-level filtering, and dynamic chain of custody tracking to keep unwanted eyes from seeing protected information. 
 

How Can Exela Help?

We’re here to provide all of your Digital Mailroom and cloud storage solutions. If you want to spearhead your business into the future, then give us a call today – we’ll talk you through all the options available to you and provide you with cutting-edge, innovative cloud processes.

Getting your business off the ground and maintaining key functions is no easy task. Dealing with incoming mail is critical to keeping any business running properly, but it can be surprisingly time-consuming, especially as your business grows in size and complexity. Mail forwarding services can help simplify, streamline, and standardize your mail handling processes. It’s also great for any business that deals with freelancers or digital nomads who need secure access to their incoming business mail from anywhere around the world.

What is Mail Forwarding?

Mail forwarding is, essentially, exactly what it sounds like - a service that receives incoming mail at one central location and forwards it to the intended recipient at a different specified address. It’s particularly useful for companies with large, distributed workforces, as well as small businesses that may change locations often. Demand for mail forwarding has been growing as businesses embrace the work from anywhere movement and grant greater flexibility to their workers.

In today’s digital-first world, most mail forwarding is done by digitization. This process involves receiving physical paper mail items at a central facility, where the items are sorted, opened, and scanned using high-definition scanners, converted into searchable digital documents, and routed electronically to the intended recipient. The physical mail can then be forwarded, stored, or destroyed, based on user preferences.

These services often also offer virtual addresses, which allows businesses to centralize mail flow and establish a physical presence in certain regions or cities.

The best mail forwarding services give you complete control of all incoming mail. Whether you choose to have certain items forwarded to you, scanned digitally and sent to you via email – or whether you need to attach e-signatures to your mail, archive mail items, or even shred junk mail – you have the freedom to choose what to receive and what to eliminate.

Avoid Losing Mail When Relocating

As businesses grow and expand, upgrading to larger or more conveniently located centers of operation is often necessary. Alternatively, businesses adopting more flexible work from anywhere policies may find it advantageous to downsize their office space and opt for smaller, less expensive real estate. Whatever the reason for relocating, an office move often risks mail getting delivered to the wrong address. Missing crucial business related mail or notices can lead to big headaches, and potentially missed deadlines and lost revenues.  

Additionally, businesses with branches, teams, or operations located in other countries can benefit from mail forwarding for expats as well.

Eliminate Unwanted Mail 

Paper might not seem like it takes up much space, but anyone who’s had to deal with a lot of junk mail knows how quickly it can pile up, especially when deliveries accumulate over time. Sifting through every individual piece of mail delivered to an office location and physically sorting and organizing them based on importance is time-consuming and tedious work.

Many mail forwarding companies work with national post offices to offer an online postal mail service to their clients. With this type of service, customers get their postal mail electronically. The best part about this service is the removal of ever receiving mail that is considered irrelevant to the company.

Go Paperless by Digitizing Mail

Digital transformation has been reshaping businesses and internal processes for years now, delivering greater efficiency and improved outcomes for companies and customers alike. No matter where your business is in its digitization journey, digitizing mail services is an excellent next step. With powerful optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent character recognition (ICR) software, paper mail is converted into full digital copies as they are scanned. These digital files make for easy integration with downstream systems that rely on digital inputs for even faster processing.

Effectively Outsource Mail Management

Mail management is outside of the core operations for the vast majority of businesses. That means it’s inefficient for them to devote staff and work hours to handling incoming mail - especially as businesses grow and the volume of incoming mail and critical business tasks expand. Business mail forwarding is a convenient way to manage mail related tasks, allowing employees to focus on other areas of their operations. 

Whether it’s dedicating more time to work on human resource management, operating procedures and product development – the ultimate result leads to improved performance and by extension increased profits for businesses.

Improve Communication

Another benefit of using mail forwarding is having better managed communication with business partners, employees, and clients. These types of services facilitate speedier, more dependable mail delivery and also offer added features like electronic signatures and easily accessible addresses that facilitate exchange or requests.

Save Money

Businesses that use mail forwarding services benefit from reduced operational costs in the form of fewer courier fees, eliminated in-office filing and storage costs, and no need for PO boxes or similar postal storage options. Additionally, the traditional mail forwarding lacks the flexibility to receive your mail at any given time. Digitizing incoming mail services also typically leads to a reduced need for onsite headcount.

Learn more about how Exela’s Digital Mailroom solution can help your business operate more efficiently, enable remote workers, and take advantage of digital innovations. 

When COVID-19 hit, suddenly many of us had to adjust to an entirely new work atmosphere. Social distancing became crucial to slowing the spread, and within weeks, remote working arrangements became the norm for more than half of the country. Now, even with many businesses around the country reopening, many people have mixed feelings about returning to the office. As of mid-May, 7 in 10 American workers were still working remotely all or part of the time, and just 1 in 4 say that they would return to the office if it was up to them.¹

As they look to reopen, businesses may need to find innovative solutions that will reassure their workers that they are taking serious precautions to protect employee health. 

Masks and temperature checks may become more common in the workplace, at least for a while. But the increased desire to maintain social distancing, and the potential for future temporary regional lockdowns to prevent a second wave, may help fuel some bigger changes and modernizations in many offices. Here are some of the new technologies and services that can help businesses provide a safe working environment while also adding new conveniences and cost-saving opportunities.

Contactless Lobbies

Protecting against a virus that can easily spread through common interactions will mean limiting as much face-to-face communication as possible. That person-to-person contact often begins with a greeting in the reception area, but that no longer needs to be the case. Exela’s Intelligent Kiosks enable guests to check in with zero human interaction. Greet guests with a pre-recorded message rather than a living, breathing, potentially contagious human, and allow them to self-register, confirm their arrival, get directions, and print their guest badge. The kiosk will even send an automated notification to the host so that they know exactly where the guest is and when they arrived.

Of course, sometimes it’s nice to be able to interact with an actual human rather than a software system, despite the threat of transferable illnesses. If a guest requires assistance with the check-in process, the Intelligent Kiosk allows them to summon a Virtual Lobby Ambassador at any time via text, audio, or video chat. A Virtual Lobby Ambassador will assist your guests with their needs or answer any questions they may have.

Mobile Facility Passes

The fact that we all carry devices capable of receiving emails and image files without physical contact can make it much easier to continue to follow social distancing guidelines, even as offices reopen. For example, a Mobile Facility Pass, stored on a visitor’s smartphone, allows both employees and guests a contactless solution for displaying security clearance. It can also be used to share useful information like maps of the building or WiFi login information, all without the need for face-to-face interaction. 

Intelligent Lockers

As we all adjust to the constraints of social distancing, contactless delivery has become a popular option for those hoping to make purchases and support businesses without risking the trip to potentially crowded shopping centers or stores. Smart lockers enable contactless delivery in a number of ways, while also providing a convenient storage option for employees.

Exela’s Intelligent Lockers can be accessed through the built-in touchscreen interface, but they can just as well be integrated with RFID, QR code, or biometric recognition technologies for a fully touchless experience. Intelligent Lockers offer flexible layouts and designs, improved access controls, anytime availability, and complete chain-of-custody tracking. They provide an excellent contactless means of exchanging, shipping, receiving, or storing goods.

Digital Mailrooms

Intelligent Lockers are great at limiting face-to-face interactions in the delivery process, but a fully integrated Digital Mailroom can take it even one step further. With Digital Mailroom, your physical mail is rerouted to a secure processing facility where it can be scanned and digitized with advanced ICR and OCR technology for completely electronic delivery. This not only helps keep your workers safe, but also centralizes your communications, and enables remote workers to access important business mail from wherever they happen to be.

Final Thoughts

Exela Smart Office solutions like these make it easier for workers to return to the office with confidence. The convenience and security these solutions provide will help keep people safe, put minds at ease, and help everyone adjust to the next normal.

COVID-19 is impacting more than just the way businesses operate their physical offices. Learn more about how the pandemic is speeding up companies’ digital transformation.

1. https://news.gallup.com/poll/311375/reviewing-remote-work-covid.aspx

The impacts of COVID-19 have not been limited to public health. The ongoing pandemic has caused significant economic problems - problems which digital transformation can help businesses mitigate.

As millions of people across the world limit their movement and avoid public gathering spaces to slow the spread of COVID-19, supply chains and cash flows have seen massive disruption. More than 100,000 small businesses have closed permanently as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The same study, conducted by researchers at the University of Illinois, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, and the University of Chicago found that at least 2% of small businesses are gone.¹

The skyrocketing unemployment numbers provide another clear indication of the severity of COVID-19’s economic toll. As of this writing, the number of unemployment claims in the US since the beginning of the pandemic in mid-March has surpassed 40 million, meaning about 1 in 4 Americans are out of work.²

It’s clear that COVID-19 is exacting a heavy economic toll. What steps can businesses take to lessen the blow and facilitate a speedy recovery in the wake of such a disaster?

How Businesses Survive Crises

Disaster can take many forms, but they really all boil down to two central problems﹘loss of assets and restricted cash flows. Luckily, there are several ways businesses can protect themselves and their assets.

For example, most businesses have some form of insurance to protect property assets from physical damage caused by fires, floods, or vandalism. In many cases, the government will also offer various forms of aid for business impacted by a disaster. In this particular crisis, the US government is stepping in to help small businesses with initiatives like the CARES Act and the Paycheck Protection Program, but these stopgap measures will only go so far, and businesses will have to take their own steps to ensure their long-term well-being.

Still, it’s best not to let your disaster recovery plan depend too much on insurance payouts or government assistance. A rainy day fund can help keep your business afloat until you’re able to get up and running again. Another viable long-term option for maintaining business continuity is investing in business process automation technology and your company’s digital transformation.

Digital Transformation as a Path Forward

For years, digital transformation has been a subject of interest for business leaders, yet the current conditions are making it more appealing than ever. With COVID-19 causing widespread business disruptions, the cost savings, efficiency gains, and disaster recovery protections digital transformation can bring to bear look particularly attractive.

There are several types of business process automation that can help companies adapt:

1. Digitization

COVID-19 has spurred immense progress in remote work, as organizations who once may have been reticent to allow it have been forced to work around or remove old barriers to enable their employees to work from the safety of their own homes. A Deloitte survey found that around 25% of people were working from home at least once a week before the pandemic, while 34% expect to work from home at least once a week post-crisis.³ While the number of people working from home is likely to fall as regions ease social distancing guidelines, remote work will permanently be more common in the next normal.

Digitizing paper-based processes is a key step to enabling remote work. For example, switching from traditional mailroom services to a solution like Exela’s Digital Mailroom transforms all incoming paper mail and other documents into fully digital assets, centralizing communications in an electronic format that can be easily accessed by employees no matter where they are.

2. Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Robotic automation isn’t just for manufacturing assembly lines. The digital bots that perform RPA tasks can be programmed to perform a wide variety of repetitive, rule-based software tasks quickly and efficiently with high levels of accuracy, freeing up their human coworkers for more engaging, higher-value work.

RPA is a cost-effective quick-to-implement solution that can benefit many facets of your business. Everything from data entry, data normalization, and multi-database search, to CRM data management and sales lead prospecting can be performed by bots with greater speed and accuracy than humans. And in the wake of COVID-19, when employees may not be able to perform all of their vital functions remotely, RPA presents a potentially business-saving value.

3. Cognitive Automation

Robotic process automation can help businesses survive disasters by putting bots to work on basic digital functions, freeing up workers and ensuring that critical functions continue to operate. Cognitive automation takes it a step further, performing more complicated tasks like context-driven decision making and data handling based on complex relationships. Utilizing advanced AI and machine learning, cognitive automation programs are capable of performing tasks that would typically require human-level reasoning abilities.

A basic use of one type of cognitive automation is how smart speakers like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home use natural language processing and machine learning to do things like interpret questions and search databases for the most relevant answers. One of the most common ways businesses are putting this kind of technology to use is incorporating it into their customer service experience. While a chatbot or automated helpdesk may not be quite on par with a human representative, this kind of system can help businesses manage surges in requests and extend their operating hours.

Cognitive automation can provide a significant boost to productivity and speed up important workflows. It’s value is likely to increase now that we are seeing an uptick in remote work and distributed teams.

Final Thoughts 

COVID-19 has presented major new challenges for individuals and businesses alike. However, the trajectory of business towards digital transformation remains the same. As economies open back up and stabilize, we’ll continue to see more automation and digitization of business processes, not only as a means to increase productivity, but also to protect against an unknown future.

Digital transformation can help businesses handle uncertainty - and not just from global pandemics. To learn more about how similar solutions can be applied to navigate other major world events, check out One Thing the Pandemic and Brexit Have in Common.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/12/small-business-used-define-americas-economy-pandemic-could-end-that-forever/
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/business/economy/coronavirus-unemployment-claims.html
3. https://www2.deloitte.com/ch/en/pages/human-capital/articles/how-covid-19-contributes-to-a-long-term-boost-in-remote-working.html

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.

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.

When COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, many businesses around the world suddenly found themselves having to accommodate remote working arrangements for the sake of their employees’ and the public’s health. The transition has proven challenging for both businesses and employees.¹ But remote working can boost morale, productivity, and savings,² while also supporting the goal of environmental sustainability³ --provided it’s done correctly, using the necessary technological tools.

Many employees suspected as much long before the pandemic, and over the last few years have increasingly been seeking out flexibility in the workplace.⁴ And the technology is there to accommodate the demand. While no one would have picked a global pandemic to catalyze a remote work revolution, it appears that is precisely what has happened.

The novel coronavirus outbreak is exposing more people to working remotely than ever. Many will grow accustomed to the benefits, and businesses wishing to stay competitive in the race to attract talent will have to continue supporting it going forward.

Thus far, remote work appears to be a good thing for business. As McKinsey points out, working remotely can boost productivity by boosting morale: “Employees who spend less time travelling or commuting and have a better work-life balance are likely to be more motivated and ready to mobilize in extreme situations.”⁵ The remote work “experiment” mandated by the coronavirus pandemic could put to rest any lingering doubts that workers can be productive and motivated outside the traditional office.

Remote Working Solutions

Our hope is that for the outbreak and resulting worldwide pivot to remote work will prove the viability of remote work, not just as part of a fully functional business continuity plan but also as part of a business-as-usual business plan. Here at Exela, here are some of the solutions we offer that can help make that happen for your business:

• Digital Mailroom
• Transactional Print and Mail
• Medical Records Management

As you work through these challenging times, we hope you’ll find this glossary of COVID-19 terms helpful. For more on the topic of remote work, you’ll want to check out COVID-19: A Tipping Point for Remote Work, a special edition of PluggedIN, Exela's thought leadership news magazine, providing fresh insights from the cutting edge every quarter. We’re offering it absolutely free.

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1. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/a-blueprint-for-remote-working-lessons-from-china
2. https://globalworkplaceanalytics.com/brags/news-releases
3. https://www.capital-ges.com/the-environmental-benefits-of-remote-working/
4. https://www.fastcompany.com/90481356/were-in-the-midst-of-a-massive-work-from-home-experiment-what-if-it-works
5. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/a-blueprint-for-remote-working-lessons-from-china

Yesterday, as I was walking my rescue hound, Lucille Ball (newly adopted, thanks to COVID-19’s having made me a homebody for who knows how long), a woman walking her own dog paused to allow the pups to greet one another.

“It’s so hard being quarantined,” she remarked from six feet away.

“Wait, you’re quarantined?” I demanded as I hastily backed away.

“Well, like everyone…you know. Right?” She was looking at me, kind of puzzled.

“You mean ‘social distancing’?”

Yeah, I’m that person. The one who corrects you if you say “quarantine” when you mean “social distancing” ... not to be unpleasant, but because the way I see it, saying “quarantine” when you mean “social distancing” is like saying “aircraft carrier” when you mean “kayak”. And now that “COVID-19” has gone from an “outbreak” to an “epidemic” to a “pandemic,” with “confirmed cases” steadily inching toward 100,000, it’s a near certainty that when talking about the illness caused by the novel “coronavirus,” you’re going to fumble your terms, at least some of the time.

Or is it? Obnoxiously word-fixated people like me aside, there’s something to be said for knowing your coronavirus terminology, even if it’s just to make sense of the daily news updates. So, here is a glossary of terms to help you make sense of the inevitable daily information overload:

Coronavirus: One of the viruses in the family of viruses that has a spiky “crown”-like appearance under a microscope. These range in severity from the common cold to the far more deadly SARS (see definition) and MERS (see definition) viruses.

MERS: Short for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a highly contagious virus that was first seen and reported in Saudi Arabia during 2012

SARS: Short for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), a viral respiratory illness caused by a coronavirus, and which was first seen and reported in February 2003, at which time a global outbreak occurred. It was subsequently contained.

SARS-CoV-2: Another abbreviation for COVID-19. It refers to the fact that COVID-19 is a SARS illness caused by a coronavirus.

COVID-19: The World Health Organization gave this name to the illness caused by the new coronavirus that first appeared in China in late 2019. It’s short for "coronavirus disease 2019.”

Outbreak: A sudden increase in diagnoses of a particular illness.

Pandemic: An "outbreak" affecting large populations or a whole region, country, or continent (as compared to an "epidemic," which affects a particular community).

Contagious: An adjective meaning “capable of spreading an illness.” The issue with COVID-19 is the length of time during which people are “contagious,” which might be for as long as 14 days from the time they are first infected with it. See “Incubation Period” below).

Incubation Period: The incubation period is the time between exposure to an illness and actually showing symptoms. People exposed to COVID-19 can take up to 14 days to show symptoms. This long incubation period is one reason COVID-19 has spread so effectively.

Containment: This refers to the effort to limit the spread of illness. Some illnesses have been contained via vaccination, but COVID-19 has no vaccination or treatment as of yet. Therefore, “containment” is accomplished via "social distancing," “isolation,” and “quarantine” (see definitions below)

Close Contact: Being with 6 feet of another person such that a “droplet” from one person could land on the other person or something the other person is wearing or holding.

Droplet: A particle of moisture from the respiratory system. Droplets expelled by someone infected with COVID-19 can spread the COVID-19 virus to another person if that second person touches the droplet and introduces it into their own respiratory system (by touching their eyes, lips, or nose).

Airborne Transmission: This is also accomplished via droplet, but a much smaller droplet - one that is small enough to be imperceptible in the air. Most COVID-19 cases are not transmitted this way.

Confirmed Case: A person who tests positive for COVID-19 via a CDC-approved lab.

Presumptive Positive Test Result: A positive test for COVID-19 that was performed by a local or state health laboratory. Presumptive becomes “confirmed” when testing is conducted in a CDC-approved lab.

Curve: A graphic representation of the number of new cases of a disease over a given period of time. The more cases in that period of time, the steeper the curve, and the greater the burden on the healthcare system.

Face Mask: Loose-fitting paper or cloth masks that form a physical barrier between the wearer and other people, with the purpose being to prevent the wearer from spreading germs when they sneeze or cough. They also can remind the wearer not touch their face.

Respirator: For COVID-19 purposes, a respirator is not a machine to help one breathe a type of face mask that doesn’t just act as a barrier but also filters out virus particles before they can be inhaled.

N95 respirator: A respirator that filters out 95% of virus particles. This is the gold standard or healthcare workers and are in short supply now.

Ventilator: A machine that moves air in and out of the lungs in the case that a patient cannot, or is having trouble breathing on their own. Unfortunately, this happens all too often in COVID-19 cases.

Quarantine: The separation of someone who has been diagnosed with an illness, has symptoms of the illness, or has reason to believe they were exposed to the illness, from other people. The duration of a quarantine is guided by the incubation period for the particular illness. Quarantine can be imposed on a person or self-administered.

Social Distancing: Is the practice of maintaining enough distance between yourself and another person to reduce the risk of breathing in droplets that are produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes. In a community, social distancing measures may include limiting or cancelling large gatherings of people.

Shelter-in-place: Finding a safe location and staying there while the crisis continues.

Lockdown: When you see this word, please know it is not an official, technical, or legal word. Rather it’s just a word people use to a non-technical word that people use to refer to any kind of public health measures being taken to prevent the virus spreading.

Spanish Flu: You're likely, at least at some point, to hear COVID-19 compared to, and contrasted with Spanish Flu. Active between April of 1918 and December 1920, this flu, which most likely originated in China but that got its name from the nation that, at least initially, put out the most media coverage of the outbreak (this was a function of wartime politics). The scary thing is that 100 million people died worldwide. The good news is we are so much better equipped to practice social distancing one than we were back in 1918. See, for example. Exela’s Digital Mailroom allows an office to function even without a mailroom or other support staff.

State-of-emergency: Declaring a state of emergency gives government officials the authority to take extra measures to protect the public, such as suspending regulations or reallocating funds to mitigate the spread of a disease.

CDC: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the U.S.'s health protection agency and a leading reliable source for COVID-19 updates for the U.S.).

WHO: The World Health Organization, which is an agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health.

Here at the Exela Blog, we strive to bring you only the most reliable, accurate, news that is relevant to you. Stay tuned for more COVID-19 content, including more about how to make remote working work for your company, which COVID-19 “offers” are really just scams, and best practices for remaining uninfected.