Less Paper – More Time The blog of the paper-less office experts – Click2Scan

The Electronic Mailroom (Part 2)

In Part 1 we started looking at the world of the Electronic Mailroom and how we best explain its uses to those people who have not come across the concept before.  I tend to use a lot of analogies to cover this, and in this case we're using 'dirty washing'. I've used this on numerous occasions to speak with non technical people about, and place a seed of understanding as to, the processes we undertake.

Sorting the Washing

When we receive the washing it's all muddled up. It contains lots of different colours and they need to be sorted because we can only wash colours together if they are the same colour.  This is a pre-washing process and would be undertaken by a human. However, in the electronic mailroom world the software is intelligent enough to identify the different colours.  Now, remember that the colours I'm referring to are your different document types. The first thing the software will do is use its business-specific logic to find out what 'colour' the 'washing' is.  Is it blue? (maybe an invoice), is it red? (maybe a letter), is it yellow? (maybe an application form).

So, sorting the washing is the same as identifying the document types. This is important because we need to know what the document type is for the next stage of the process.

Doing the Washing

This next stage  is where we put each different type of washing in for its specific wash.

Before we put on the load we need to remove the dirt from our washing.  The 'dirt' is the data that we need to extract. This part can be really complicated as we may need to verify that we have removed the right dirt by looking at samples from elsewhere.  But in its simplest form we just want to remove the dirt!

Now, we have an item of blue washing – it's an invoice – and we need to extract the PO number, invoice number and many more different types of data.  There's only one thing holding us back at this point: we don't know where on the page this information is, because we may have different 'shades' of blue for different suppliers or the dirt may be in different places.  In an electronic mailroom scenario the software uses business logic to find the dirt, or data, and remove it automatically.

So, there we go, we've Sorted our washing and washed it. In a practical world though, theres still more to do.  It needs to be ironed and placed into the cupboard, ready for use.  These two final stages I'll cover in part 3 of the blog.

Read part 3

Recommended posts:

1. The Electronic Mailroom (Part 1)
2. Is Document Imaging Dead?
3. The Step by Step Guide to Becoming the Perfect Paperless Office
4. Process Management On-the-Go with FileDirector
5. Distributed Capture the Easy Way