The COVID-19 pandemic changed the way businesses operate. Newer ways of handling business activities have replaced many processes we followed before the pandemic, such as digital payments, web-based communication, and, most significantly, remote work. In addition, employee shortages have been common throughout the last two years of the pandemic—and with continuing localized shutdowns and movement restrictions, more and more employees may be unable to attend work physically as the pandemic progresses.

The importance of cutting out the paper trail

While we may think that most businesses have now moved to digital processes, you would be surprised at how much paper still flows through corporate offices, showrooms, logistical facilities and manufacturing units!

When paper-based processes cause bottlenecks, the amount of time and money lost is significant. Is your office guilty of any of these inefficient paper processes?

• Does your administrative staff spend precious time sorting and hand-delivering paper documents from department to department or from desk to desk? What will happen if the employee who sorts and delivers is absent? Will it cause a paper pileup and leave other employees in a fix?

• Do your operational teams still rely on manual data entry from paper documents into spreadsheets or your existing IT systems? Errors in manual data entry take up costly resources and can even lead to financial penalties or loss of reputation.

• Do your managers follow time-consuming, manual or paper-based processes for reviewing or approving documents or tasks? If a manager is absent from work, will a lack of paper approvals cause work activities to slow down and lead to a drop in productivity?

Coping with employee shortages is a challenge all organizations must prepare for. Cutting out paper and manual processes will be a crucial strategy to keep the cogs turning even if employees are away from the office—whether they are absent, have left their jobs, or are working from home.

Intelligent data capture software: Automation to beat employee shortages

Intelligent data capture software automates content ingestion—automatically identifying information for data extraction—and routes it to the right people and software systems in the organization. It combines standard capture features, such as optical character recognition (OCR), with powerful machine learning and artificial intelligence to extract information from content.

Your team saves time in manual data entry and manual corrections on paper documents. In addition, efficient, automatic data extraction supports downstream business processes and speeds up workflows throughout the organization.

At RDS, we use OpenText Intelligent Capture software every day to capture millions of documents for clients in our document scanning bureau.

Mission-critical processes like procure-to-pay, AP, AR, inventory management benefit from intelligent data capture software by reducing or eliminating FTE effort hours expended in entering or processing data manually. Document digitization, combined with intelligent data capture, reduces repeatable effort hours spent on mundane activities.

Fortunately, businesses can take advantage of technology to digitally capture information from paper documents at their source and automate the routing of incoming paper documents. It reduces human touchpoints drastically and creates more streamlined workflows to enhance productivity and bring in cost efficiencies.

For example, in many corporate mailrooms, the handling of inbound mail is still primarily a manual process. 

Administrative staff physically collect mail and packages from couriers, sort them and hand-deliver them to the correct recipients. The entire process is manual and relies heavily on the staff's memory and experience. If there is employee turnover or absenteeism, it isn't easy to train new employees and bring them up to speed.

The paper mail dilemma: How digital mailrooms mitigate the risks of inbound paper mail 

The COVID pandemic complicated the physical mail dilemma. Office shutdowns and work-from-home mandates hampered manual sorting and delivery of paper mail. 

Most executives and business owners overlook the fact that physical mail may be risky—and the risk is two-fold: 

1. Paper mail increases the number of human touchpoints required as it involves handling by several people, transportation which cannot be well-controlled and sorting at the sender's facility and the receiver's office.

2. More importantly, paper slows down processes. It creates bottlenecks in downstream business activities. For example, suppose essential contract papers or urgent invoices are stuck in a manual workflow involving a courier agency, road transport, sorting facilities, and the office mailroom staff. In that case, it can cause delays and leave room for inefficiencies.

In addition, employee shortages and work-from-home mandates during the pandemic have made the delivery of inbound paper mail a complex task.

Just as organizations have adopted new digital means of communication, they must also find ways to stop the trail of inbound paper into the organization and move to more efficient and newer ways of handling incoming paper mail.

One may not think of the mailroom as an area for great innovation during employee shortages—but a mailroom is a place where data capture software and automation technology can mitigate new challenges thrown up by the pandemic. 

Automate processes by capturing documents at the source

By digitizing all inbound paper at its source, you eliminate sorting, routing, delivery and redelivery of physical documents.

Revolution Data Systems offers a comprehensive mail scanning service to automate your corporate mail handling processes, save time and labor and deal with worker shortages and hybrid work scenarios.

A digital mailroom is a high-speed scanning hub for incoming mail, including paper checks, invoices, contracts, agreements, HR or recruitment documents and more. Using intelligent capture software can speed up transactional business processes like loan origination, invoice processing, customer service response management, surveys, medical claims and much more.

It avoids delays in processing incoming data by reducing the number of human interventions for each process.

It makes business processes simpler and eliminates manual errors. As digital documents can be found quickly and shared easily between employees—it enhances collaboration, raises productivity and ensures business continuity.

In conclusion

We have a team of OpenText Intelligent Capture software experts to provide maintenance, support, upgrades, and custom development to clients globally. We can show you how to use the software internally or you can outsource the heavy lifting to our team.

Our document digitization services help you focus on business-critical tasks instead of chasing paper around. Scanning your paper records provides instant, anywhere access to your information.

Contact RDS today and navigate employee shortages using our intelligent capture software solutions.