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Here’s the Real Reason Remote Working is Here to Stay

Here’s the Real Reason Remote Working is Here to Stay
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Lauren Cahn
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When COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, many businesses around the world suddenly found themselves having to accommodate remote working arrangements for the sake of their employees’ and the public’s health. The transition has proven challenging for both businesses and employees.1 But remote working can boost morale, productivity, and savings,2 while also supporting the goal of environmental sustainability3 --provided it’s done correctly, using the necessary technological tools.

Many employees suspected as much long before the pandemic, and over the last few years have increasingly been seeking out flexibility in the workplace.4 And the technology is there to accommodate the demand. While no one would have picked a global pandemic to catalyze a remote work revolution, it appears that is precisely what has happened.

The novel coronavirus outbreak is exposing more people to working remotely than ever. Many will grow accustomed to the benefits, and businesses wishing to stay competitive in the race to attract talent will have to continue supporting it going forward.

Thus far, remote work appears to be a good thing for business. As McKinsey points out, working remotely can boost productivity by boosting morale: “Employees who spend less time travelling or commuting and have a better work-life balance are likely to be more motivated and ready to mobilize in extreme situations.”5 The remote work “experiment” mandated by the coronavirus pandemic could put to rest any lingering doubts that workers can be productive and motivated outside the traditional office.

Remote Working Solutions

Our hope is that for the outbreak and resulting worldwide pivot to remote work will prove the viability of remote work, not just as part of a fully functional business continuity plan but also as part of a business-as-usual business plan. Here at Exela, here are some of the solutions we offer that can help make that happen for your business:

As you work through these challenging times, we hope you’ll find this glossary of COVID-19 terms helpful. For more on the topic of remote work, you’ll want to check out COVID-19: A Tipping Point for Remote Work, a special edition of PluggedIN, Exela's thought leadership news magazine, providing fresh insights from the cutting edge every quarter. We’re offering it absolutely free.

Subscribe. Plug in. Upgrade your mind.

  1. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/a-blueprint-for-remote-working-lessons-from-china
  2. https://globalworkplaceanalytics.com/brags/news-releases
  3. https://www.capital-ges.com/the-environmental-benefits-of-remote-working/
  4. https://www.fastcompany.com/90481356/were-in-the-midst-of-a-massive-work-from-home-experiment-what-if-it-works
  5. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/a-blueprint-for-remote-working-lessons-from-china

What is Exela’s Digital Mailroom, and How Does it Work?

What is Exela’s Digital Mailroom, and How Does it Work?
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Niharika Sharma

In our advanced tech-inclined world, it’s more important than ever for your business to evolve with changing technologies. A digital mailroom is one of these technologies that allows businesses to view their postal mail from anywhere in the world.

Here's How Digital Mailroom Works

Exela's Digital Mailroom is a cloud-based solution that offers end-to-end workflow management and enables organizations to streamline the intake and distribution of mail. Digital Mailroom incorporates state-of-the-art technology for intelligent data extraction, scanning, indexing, routing, and secure archiving. We do it all while ensuring high data protection and encryption levels in transfer, transit, and rest.

Incoming business mail is forwarded to one of Exela's 28 SSAE-18-certified mail processing centers in the US for offsite processing. Here we open and digitize all mail pieces and transmit them to the Digital Mailroom Portal.

Scanning and digitizing make your mail more easily accessible and enables simplified sharing with colleagues, collaborators, and even internal automated systems. The mail is processed for routing within 24 working hours of receipt, ensuring there is no delay for customers in accessing their mail. Streamlining mail through Digital Mailroom can benefit your business in many ways, most important being:

  • - Greater efficiency and process control
  • - Faster mail routing
  • - Elimination of manual errors while sorting or indexing
  • - Easier accessibility
  • - Full integration with downstream workflows
  • - Enhanced visibility and reporting
  • - Superior information management
  • - Improved customer service
  • - Improved compliance and data security
  • - Full audit trails and chain of custody

Choosing the Right Digital Mailroom Solution for Your Business

When digitizing your mailroom, it’s essential to consider the options based on your company’s needs. For example, how you answer some of the following questions might affect the solution you choose:

  • - How distributed is the receipt of mail across your organization?
  • - What would be a suitable location from which to route mail?
  • - What should be done with original hard copy paper documents after they’re digitized?
  • - What is the volume of documents through the post?
  • - Do you receive cheque payments through the post?
  • - What are your current policies regarding third-party process outsourcing? 

Exela’s Digital Mailroom processes all documents in highly secure facilities that include video surveillance, badge access restrictions, and biometric scanners at data centers. These processing centers are secured for regulated and classified equipment, hold-open door alarms, and additional security measures. All data is stored in encrypted formats, and access to information is restricted based on a need-to-know segregated-duties basis.

How Digital Mailroom Can Improve your Customer Service and Productivity

Digital Mailroom offers a unique way to ensure your services are always excellent and productivity improves. Let's find out how.

Easy Access to Critical Data

Exela's DMR portal is cloud-hosted. This gives you instant access to digital mail, and you can receive your mail wherever and wherever you are. Furthermore, you can choose to forward, recycle, or shred the mail entirely, which prevents unnecessary interruptions by trips to the mailroom or having to visit a central headquarters.

Reduced Costs

Digital Mailroom lowers your operating costs in several important ways. The most apparent is through the increased efficiency and reduced fixed costs that come with eliminating in-house mailroom services. DMR effectively increases productivity while reducing labor costs.

Further savings come from replacing physical storage with cloud-based digital storage. Digitizing your incoming business mail allows you to not only reduce the square footage dedicated to document storage (often in expensive real estate), but enable easier and more cost-effective digital sharing, as opposed to costly and time-consuming physical delivery.

Switching to a digital mailroom also means reduced overhead costs on supplies, paper materials, equipment maintenance, and other document management costs.

Faster Processing Ensures Speedy Responses

Digital mail solutions will allow you to merge your incoming mail with your digital document and information stream at the earliest point. This essentially streamlines the front-end of critical business functions, from accounts receivable to invoices and any other operations processes that require external inputs. By centralizing all inbound information, you can improve turnaround times, standardize processes, optimize workflows, and reduce manual errors.

Well Organized Mail Distribution

When you partner with a digital mailroom service, you'll be handing off the burden of organizing your mail, placing it in the hands of the mailroom operator. Digital Mailroom providers like Exela specialize in creating mailroom tools and workflows to ensure efficient mail processing, accurate mail routing, and prompt electronic delivery.

Digital Mailroom operators create unique mail IDs or barcode labels for each mail item, allowing for easy monitoring throughout the delivery process. This is an essential feature when dealing with sensitive documents and checks.

Enhances Your Security and Data Privacy

While digital data breaches and leaks may be top of mind when it comes to information security, it’s easy to forget that paper documents pose their own risks as well. If a document with sensitive information is accidentally delivered to the wrong place, misfiled, or left out in the open, it can be very easy for someone without proper clearance to view. Physical documents stored in unsecured filing cabinets can be easily accessed with no trace of who viewed them, when, or how many times.

Digitizing your documents and paper mail allows for greater security and tracking, ensuring your sensitive information is protected and accounted for. Exela’s DMR mail centers meet or exceed the HIPAA, HITRUST, SSAE-18, SOC-2, and Veracode security standards, for a reliably secure digitization process. Once documents are digitized, we implement role-based data access, document classification and content-level filtering, and dynamic chain of custody tracking to keep unwanted eyes from seeing protected information.

How Can Exela Help?

We’re here to provide all of your Digital Mailroom and cloud storage solutions. If you want to spearhead your business into the future, then give us a call today – we’ll talk you through all the options available to you and provide you with cutting-edge, innovative cloud processes.

Digital Mailroom for Disaster Recovery

Digital Mailroom for Disaster Recovery

How Exela helped a law firm quickly switch to a remote work environment and keep operations running smoothly during a pandemic

Challenge

In the wake of stay-at-home orders meant to slow the spread of COVID-19, a Los Angeles-based law firm, with two other offices in the US, was struggling to fully adapt to remote work. They found that they still needed to periodically send employees to the office in order to collect business-critical mail. This process was proving to be inefficient, mail was delayed, and employees were being exposed to unnecessary risk. A backlog of mail had been building up at the firm’s offices, and a mail solution was needed that could be implemented very quickly, but also one that upheld strict security standards related to the handling of legal documents. The firm was looking for a partner that could implement a better mail system within days, while also providing chain of custody tracking and full information security.

Solution

Exela’s Digital Mailroom (DMR) and web-based DMR Portal provide the perfect solution for distributing physical mail to remote workers via an electronic medium. In response to COVID-19, Exela developed a new Rapid Response Digital Mail Solution capable of being implemented within just 10 days. In this case, Exela’s Rapid Response Team worked closely with the customer to present a solution proposal within 48 hours. Shortly afterwards, a complete statement of work was able to be finalized that satisfied the Business Requirements Document, desired scope of work (SOW), and rapid deployment requirements. Exela offered to address the backlog of mail as well as 100% of future mail volumes, and also offered to arrange the pickup and transfer of physical mail at the customer’s location in order to prevent disruption to their business. A PO box was established for the customer and a process was put in place to route all mail from the PO box to one of Exela’s nearby mail processing centers. This ensured that the firm would not have to physically retrieve any incoming mail once the Digital Mailroom process was implemented. Within 10 days of signing the SOW, Exela was receiving, processing, and distributing the customer’s mail. In addition to providing resources capable of handling 100% of the firm’s mail volume, Exela’s distributed network of processing facilities and cloud-hosted data management capabilities ensure layered disaster recovery protections. Digital Mailroom customers are always protected by the full business continuity planning and processing redundancies that are made possible by a global operational footprint and flexible, location-agnostic software platforms.

Benefits
  • - Solution deployable within 10 days
  • - Strengthened information security
  • - Cost savings through the elimination of remailing
  • - Rapidly scalable operations
  • - Cloud-hosted anytime, anywhere access to mail
  • - Easy-to-use platform requires minimal training
  • - Business continuity planning and multiregional disaster recovery protections
  • - Ability to build on the foundational solution to launch downstream processing using Exela or third-party workflow solutions
  • - Makes paper mail searchable and easily shareable

 

Discover What Exela's Digital Mailroom Can Do For You