When we hear about automating back-office business processes, we don’t always hear the financial implications in hard numbers. And document management processes seldom make headlines. But for a large enterprise with thousands of customers, the people, processes and systems that support outgoing mail initiatives, whether they be transactional or marketing oriented, are essential to achieving business objectives. And any time there is outgoing mail, there is returned mail – which sets off its own set of processes to scan, correct the address and update related data systems, not to mention the cost of reprinting and the associated cost to mail it again.
When a company automates these processes with robotic process automation (RPA) – software bots that can execute rules-based processes just like a human would – the return on investment can be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the benefits aren’t just in the numbers. RPA can decrease the turnaround time required to process returned mail from 30 days down to two. And it can free employees to focus on strategic work that contributes to the overall improvement of operations. But realizing the benefits of this new technology requires some due diligence.
I explore how to get started in a recent article for Document Strategy: Automating Returned Mail with RPA. Read it and contact me to discuss further.
Dave Zamorski is a leading authority on enterprise print communications. Applying a no-nonsense approach utilizing his Black Belt in Six Sigma and 30+ years’ experience, Dave helps organizations understand, control and reduce their print spend.
