How intelligent automation can optimise processes

For companies that have to process large amounts of mail items and forms on an everyday basis, Intelligent Automation (IA) can be a game changer. Incoming mail items are digitised and documents are recorded electronically to make business processes more efficient.

 

Imagine a large company that has its own in-house mailroom. Each and every day, hundreds if not thousands of mail items are received and have to be processed without delay. Traditionally, only mail items and parcels required manual sorting, but nowadays intelligent automation can significantly support the processing of large data volumes at any mailroom. Your business processes might benefit from this as well.

 

How does IA work?

 

As a first step, all incoming physical documents are scanned. Optical character recognition (OCR) turns incoming documents into a digital format that can be edited and searched. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), information from the documents is extracted and subsequently classified. Robot process automation (RPA) also takes care of routine tasks such as data entry or logging on to specific applications.

 

Up to 80 percent of all mailroom processes can be automated as described above. To make sure almost all provided data are accurate, the results of the automation process additionally undergo a quality assurance process and are then validated. This will help maintain high data quality at all times.

 

What are the benefits of IA?

 

At many companies, employees have to interpret and classify huge amounts of data from mail items, invoices, orders, and forms and subsequently enter them into other applications each and every day. With intelligent automation, these recurring routine processes can be automated. This leaves significantly less room for error.

 

Digital data classification achieves a precision level of up to 98 percent while reducing the required data processing time by half. This allows employees to focus on higher-value tasks and to respond more quickly to customer inquiries. Happy employees, satisfied customers and a cost decrease of up to 80% thanks to reduced manual labour - the benefits speak for themselves!

 

Österreichische Post now uses IA technology for all input management solutions. Here are a few examples:

 

Digital incoming mail: Incoming mail won't remain in the mailroom very long or end up in the wrong department. Thanks to IA, incoming and subsequently digitised mail items are immediately classified with the help of metadata and automatically assigned to the employees in question.

 

Invoice processing: Traditionally, accounting staff have to process invoice data manually and enter them into an accounting system, which can be a tedious and time-consuming task. IA automates these steps as well as the subsequent invoice check. Thanks to a connection to the document management system (DMS), all authorised persons can then view, authorise, and revise all invoices, no matter where these employees are at a given point.

 

Order processing: Most companies handle order processes that can be complex and include many numbers and information. To save time and resources, outsourcing these processes to Österreichische Post is a great option. Order data and information will automatically be recognised via AI and processed as needed.

 

Form processing: Forms also usually include a lot of data and information and manual processing takes a lot of time. With the help of IA technology, such data can also be automatically analysed, classified, and processed. For instance, prize draw cards can automatically be incorporated into a company’s in-house customer relationship management (CRM) tool. This will save money compared to manual entry.

Your benefits at a glance

 

Intelligent automation helps companies accelerate time-consuming business processes. The mail benefits of IA are:

  • Increased precision – IA can significantly reduce data processing errors.

  • Swifter data processing – IA makes relevant data available more swiftly.

  • Saves money – The automation of high-volume and repetitive processes reduces your staff's workload and decreases labour costs.

  • Improved customer experience – IA allows companies to quickly react to customer requests, which significantly increases customer satisfaction.