The stakeholder engagement paradigm has changed. Not only are organizations communicating with customers, suppliers, partners, and other constituents through additional channels, but the dynamics of those communications have been altered. The relationship itself is gaining value and is increasingly dependent on immediacy, transparency, and bidirectional communication via the preferred medium.
At the same time, enterprises continue to focus efforts on improving the productivity of their line-of-business knowledge workers in order to reduce the time they spend on an activity and to improve the quality and reliability of the decisions they make. Because these activities and decisions play a key role in the stakeholder relationship and ultimate business outcomes, strategies to streamline communication processes and perfect key data exchanges are essential.

Organizations frequently turn to business process automation to reduce cycle time and error rates. However, many processes still result in a significant number of exception situations that require manual handling by line-of-business workers. In addition, exception resolution may require workers to reach back to customers or other stakeholders, essentially restarting the process from the beginning, resulting in frustration and inefficiency on all sides.

The solution is a tightly integrated system that extends between where the stakeholder request originates and where the decision-making systems begin. The system must be able to accurately extract critical data from documents submitted via multiple channels with minimal or no stakeholder intervention. Furthermore, it must be able to consistently perfect documents and data before they are entered into the proper systems of record for high-value/high-cost decision-making processes.

Every day, organizations receive high volumes of various types of documents from different channels that launch or continue internal business processes. Reviewing and interpreting these documents, entering data from them, and forwarding them on to others for further processing consumes company time and resources, which increases operating costs and negatively impacts customer and supplier responsiveness. A digital mailroom powered by enterprise-level capture and business process management (BPM) technology solves these problems by converting incoming documents—whether originating from mail, fax, email, multi-function peripherals (MFPs), web portals, or mobile devices and tablets—into structured electronic information that feeds multiple business processes and systems across the enterprise.

In almost every organization there are accounting, human resources, purchasing, contract management and customer service processes. In addition, there are vertical market-special processes, such as insurance claims processing, mortgage processing, electronic health records management, new bank account opening, case management in government, and so on. Business process management (BPM) and dynamic case management (DCM) are used to orchestrate and automate the complex sequence of steps required to complete these processes, and these processes frequently require the capture of incoming business documents as part of the process.

Smart capture solutions capture and streamline the flow of business critical information throughout an organization in a more accurate, timely and cost effective manner. This white paper overviews how Smart capture can transform traditional incoming document reception and processing into an efficient ”digital mailroom” that helps organizations reduce costs, drive process efficiency, and improve customer service and market competitiveness to better grow their businesses.