The mailroom automation is the hub for all documents that arrive at your company. Chances are good that you already process your high-volume documents automatically. However, since many other relevant documents also arrive in the mailroom, this only brings you limited benefits and one crucial factor is missing: the conversion of all documents into structured data as soon as they arrive.
The good thing is that innovative ways to optimize your mailroom are now available. By integrating an Intelligent Document Processing solution, you can automatically process document types that have a comparatively low volume, but the data in structured form is just as important for your business processes and decisions.
In this article, we’ll address these points:
- what the problems are with manual processing,
- what the limitations of industry-specific automation are,
- what IDP is and can do,
- why IDP is the best solution for your mailroom automation, and
- how leading real estate companies are automating their mailroom with Parashift.
1. The problems with manual processing of the incoming mail
Completely manual processing of incoming mail is hardly common anymore, but it still exists. If your employees have to check the incoming physical and digital mail and type the data from it into an ERP or DMS system, this creates several problems for you:
1. Major time investment and high costs: Manual processing of your company’s incoming mail takes a lot of time. Depending on the size of your company, several employees may be busy processing company mail. Manual document classification, processing and distribution quickly results in high costs.
2. Tedious work and high error rate: Manual data entry demotivates your employees. Furthermore, manual processing always increases the possibility of errors. Misplaced or lost incoming mail is also part of the real complications here.
3. Slow processes and no agility: Manual processing of incoming mail leads to slow downstream processes. Agile processes and operational efficiency are not possible. This in turn can result in missed opportunities or reduced customer satisfaction due to delayed feedback.
4. Lack of visibility and traceability: Data protection is a key driver for your business. However, manual interactions in the mailroom mean that there is a lack of transparency and traceability is difficult. This makes it extremely difficult to meet stringent compliance regulations.
2. Limitations due to the industry-specific automation
You may already have integrated automation solutions for certain documents in the mailroom. This gives you some advantages in terms of costs and efficiency. However, such OCR solutions are either only targeted at high-volume document types (such as invoices) or are specialized niche providers (for example, exclusively for accounting). The long project runtimes of these solutions make it economically impossible for you to automate the entire mailroom.
In addition, legacy OCR solutions are inflexible and not designed to handle hundreds of document types at a reasonable cost:
- Many different document types with low to medium volumes are too expensive for automated processing
- They are dependent on templates and different layouts generate an enormous configuration effort
- Each new document type requires extensive and expensive setup and training time that blocks business processes
So even if you have already automated parts of your mailroom: The variety of document types still opens up huge optimization opportunities. For end-to-end digitization, you need to be able to convert all of the documents into structured data as they come in. This is where Intelligent Document Processing makes the difference and guarantees the automation of your mailroom.
3. Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)
What you want for your mailroom automation is Intelligent Document Processing (IDP). This innovative system combines powerful technologies to enable unprecedented flexibility and robustness in document extraction and processing.
The features of IDP:
- Is based on AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies such as Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Deep Learning, Computer Vision and also uses Optical Character Recognition.
- Does not require templates and works independently of document layout.
- Can automatically capture and extract not only semi-structured and structured data, but also unstructured data from documents.
- Cloud-based solutions are compatible with existing software landscapes and without requiring you to replace your proven business applications.
- Modern solutions are built according to the no-code principle, so that employees outside IT departments can also work with them.
- The system is able to learn and continuously improve based on the data.
Mailroom automation with Parashift IDP: Reduce your process costs and turnaround times by up to 90% – even in the first year of operation!
4. Why IDP is the best solution for automating your mailbox
IDP’s functionalities are ideal for digitizing and automating your mailroom. However, even modern IDP solutions have significant differences in their capabilities. Parashift focuses exclusively on the following four components:
Document separation, classification, extraction and validation.
This provides you with a state of the art Intelligent Document Processing solution for your mailroom. Wondering how so many different document types can be processed through a single platform?
The Parashift IDP platform is based on proprietary Document Swarm Learning technology. Document Swarm Learning allows you to classify hundreds of document types and extract document data. The Parashift platform acts like an upgrade to your existing mailroom application landscape, without having to write off existing investments. The machine learning algorithms that power Document Swarm Learning learn with every document, from every customer, and from every industry. This represents a unique capability in the IDP industry. It does this by splitting document types into individual fields, creating a global data network for unprecedented out-of-the-box capabilities. Shared learnings across document types, customers, and industries ensure maximum efficiency.
With Parashift’s AI-powered platform, you free your employees from tedious work, continuously lower costs, and reduce cycle times. In addition, you realize:
- you process hundreds of different document types automatically and with a single solution.
- you extract all relevant data from documents, including line item data.
- your employees configure individual document types with virtually no additional effort (and thanks to the no-code platform and out-of-the-box functions, without IT specialists).
- integration into existing software landscapes is no problem. All without having to replace your proven business applications.
- a global data network (Document Swarm Learning) for AI ensures continuous learning across all documents and continuous performance improvement.
Parashift’s unique solution approach is highly interesting for us as a long-standing and innovative solution integrator in the area of digitization of document-related processes. The technology ideally complements our existing solution portfolio. Thanks to Parashift, our customers benefit from tailored and sustainable solutions and services. – Dominic Wullschleger, Head of Sales & Marketing at Arcplace
5. Leading real estate companies automate their mailroom with Parashift IDP
As a real estate company, your inbox is constantly flooded with countless different documents: invoices, contracts, forms, claims reports, protocols, complaints, inquiries, information, permits, and all sorts of other correspondence, just to name a few.
With Parashift, you as a real estate company integrate a virtual hub for business mail directly into your system landscape. The document types mentioned above and many more are automatically classified and all relevant data, including line item data, is extracted. The data is then delivered in structured form to your ERP system or into workflows.
6. Conclusion
Parashift’s AI-based Intelligent Document Processing is the best solution for your mailroom because:
- You can finally automate complex and low-volume document types,
- You take advantage of a global cloud solution with a global AI data network,
- You benefit from a fantastic user interface with a no-code approach, and
- You can reduce turnaround times, lower costs and bring agility back to your business.
