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In 2016, the USPS delivered 27 billion pieces of B2B mail. Here and now, in the digital age, that's a lot of paper - and it's being distributed to pretty much every corner of your organization.Moving all that physical mail is expensive, probably much more expensive than you think. But you may never know, because it's really difficult to get metrics on physical mail. In fact, I've never talked to a company that had reasonable metrics on their mail.

So, you say, why does this matter? Well, I've got a couple of examples that may surprise the heck out of you.

Example #1
A large U.S. bank estimated that their cost to deliver mail was $0.48 per piece (that's just delivery to the internal destination, and doesn't include any processing after that). When we did an actual quantifiable analysis of their inbound mail, we discovered that their volume estimates were inflated by 200%. In other words, if they estimated they were processing 100,000 pieces of mail per month, the actual volume was only 33,000. (I've changed the volume numbers to ensure anonymity). This means the actual cost of delivery is really $1.34 per piece and the productivity of their mailroom staff is literally 1/3 of what they thought. Trust me, they receive and deliver a lot of mail so the cost (and potential savings) add up. The moral: If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.

Example #2
During an initial meeting, a senior manager at a large U.S. institution told us he didn't think physical mail was much of a problem because, in his personal experience, "I don't get much mail anymore." Later, our detailed analysis identified that the company received well over 10 million pieces of inbound mail per year and that it had the following characteristics:

More than 80% was transactional - headed to a department, not a person.

Millions of pieces were redistributed through interoffice mail - sometimes 2 or more times per piece.

Hundreds of thousands of pieces were copied one or more times to facilitate complex operational workflows.

We calculated the actual cost of delivery of mail to be in excess of $2.00 per piece - pretty surprising considering that management initially thought they didn't have a mail problem. Again: If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.
Digitized mail metrics let you know:

exactly how many pieces you're receiving and who they're going to - so you know where to focus on process improvement.

exactly how long it takes to get a piece of mail to the right destination, and how long it takes to process the queue of mail - so you understand your customer responsiveness and manage SLAs.

how many people are working on each queue of mail, so you see how efficiently your resources are allocated.

how to track outlier mail that isn't being processed, so you can see areas that are understaffed.

In addition to the core advantages of metrics, it's important to note that simply digitizing your inbound mail at the point of receipt eliminates a huge portion of its associated costs - pretty much every cost that relates to moving the physical paper (which has no real value except as a medium to hold the data).

The bottom line is pretty obvious. Digitizing inbound mail turns a problematic anachronism - one that touches almost every area of your business - into a powerful digital asset that gives you transparency into your business and helps you manage and improve it. Until today, you might never have focused on your physical mail. But now that we've measured the problem, you may realize that getting rid of legacy paper mail can help you cut costs and improve your business in a multitude of ways.
Eco-Mail is a secure, scalable, Digital Post Office system that transforms incoming physical mail into powerful digital assets - at their point of entry to your business. We enable clients to streamline their operations, increase response times, improve their controls and compliance - and, by the way, save a huge amount of money. We're already helping one of America's three largest banks. We love to talk about digital mail, so email me direct if you like at [email protected]

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If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. - Eco Mail

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In 2016, the USPS delivered 27 billion pieces of B2B mail. Here and now, in the digital age, that's a lot of paper - and it's being distributed to pretty much every corner of your organization.Moving all that physical mail is expensive, probably much more expensive than you think.

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It's 2018, and physical mail really should be a thing of the past - but it isn't. The USPS still sent 27 billion pieces of B2B paper mail in 2016, and it hasn't abated. In all likelihood, this means your company still receives a massive amount of actionable mail - and that at least some part of your critical business operations are still taking place on paper.

Digitizing inbound mail offers the potential to realize tremendous efficiencies and cost savings - but for some customers, digitizing mail in a central location seems to introduce new security and privacy risks that weigh heavily. Of course, there is some risk, but it's all relative - and relatively speaking, digital mail is MUCH less risky than physical.

In a digital mail environment, communications are opened, scanned, stored and dispositioned in a few monitored, secure locations. Opening and scanning is highly automated and takes an average of 9 seconds per document - minimal exposure under maximum supervision. Digitized documents are immediately processed with patented encryption technology, and securely delivered to the intended recipient - and only the intended recipient. Automated audit controls track every flow, access, and action taken on each document. Who, what, when and where become instantly transparent, and document security is significantly improved.

Conversely, physical mail is sent through interoffice mail, with minimal audit and tracking controls, if any. Assuming it doesn't get lost, it most likely ends up in a cubby hole in a copy room or pantry, accessible to anyone who walks by and grabs it, whether maliciously or by mistake. When it finally does make it to the intended recipient, it may sit on a desk, opened and untended, for a day, overnight, or even longer.

Clearly, paper mail carries significant risk - at some point in its lifespan, it's simply out there in the open. For prying eyes and bad actors, physical documents are an effortless, tempting opportunity to access confidential, business-critical information.

Physical mail also presents other kinds of risks: the risk that a document is delivered to the wrong place, misplaced or forgotten by the recipient - in any case, not acted upon quickly enough - and the risk that physical contaminants can be released anywhere within your premises.

It's all a matter of perspective. With a robust digital mail solution, the paper finally disappears for good - and with it, the risks of exposing personal or confidential information, of failure to respond in a timely way, and of contamination at unknown destinations. Your critical business stops getting lost or delayed - and never ends up in the wrong hands. Finally, when your organization rolls out these digital processes, you rapidly realize newfound efficiencies, significant cost savings and the exact same standards for security and privacy you expect from the rest of your digitally empowered business. At least for me, a few seconds of controlled exposure in the mailroom suddenly doesn't seem so risky.
Eco-Mail is a secure, scalable, Digital Post Office system that transforms incoming physical mail into powerful digital assets - at their point of entry to your business. We enable clients to streamline their operations, increase response times, improve their controls and compliance - and, by the way, save a huge amount of money. We're already helping one of America's three largest banks. We love to talk about digital mail, so email me direct if you like at [email protected]

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It's 10 PM - Do you know where your mail is? - Eco Mail

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It's 2018, and physical mail really should be a thing of the past - but it isn't. The USPS still sent 27 billion pieces of B2B paper mail in 2016, and it hasn't abated.

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Okay, I admit it. Robots aren't coming to your office anytime soon - but Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is already here. Generally speaking, RPA is a way to use software robots to easily automate processes both within the same system and across multiple systems. RPA automates a lot of clerical processes which drives down costs, while also increasing the speed of processing and the quality of outcomes.

By now, the majority of your communications probably arrive digitally but, as recently as last year, there are still 25 billion pieces of B2B mail annually - the long tail of physical mail isn't going to go away any time soon. Most of the remaining physical mail is also transactional which generally means that data needs to be extracted and merged with your existing digital databases and workflow systems.

Data extraction from physical documents isn't a core function for any business. It's a time consuming, labor intensive, expensive, and error prone process whose only purpose is to get the data you need to perform your value adding, core business processes. RPA is the perfect solution.

Digitizing the physical mail your company receives at the point of acceptance creates a prime opportunity for RPA. Physical mail is distributed to nearly every area of your business, but there are several processes that are common to the vast majority, if not all, of your mail.

The most common process is sorting and delivery which applies to every piece of mail. This requires reading the address and routing it to the right destination. In its simplest form, once digitized, RPA can OCR the envelope, look up recipients against a database and route the mail to the right person or group. RPA can also determine if the mail should be delivered to a transactional user interface, as an email attachment, or even discarded if it is standard class "junk" mail.

RPA can also be utilized to examine mail being distributed to specific destinations, automatically sub-categorize it based on known content types, extract information, and even structure the extracted data so it can be integrated with existing processing systems.

Digital mail distribution and RPA are perfect complements to each other and to your business. Digital mail distribution is easy to set up and works on virtually all of your mail. By itself, it eliminates mail sorting and delivery, interoffice mail and duplication costs while speeding turnaround times and adding automated metrics, audit and compliance controls. RPA can seamlessly be added to transactional mail queues to automate the data extraction and integration with existing workflow systems.

The robots are coming.....and they are certain to make your business more nimble and efficient!

Jay Maller is the founder and CEO of Eco-mail. He has 30+ years of management experience leading the design, development and implementation of financial products: prime brokerage, hedge fund, portfolio accounting, and fixed-income derivatives trading solutions. As Managing Director at Morgan Stanley, he led the development of the business' industry-leading client facing applications, proprietary multi-currency portfolio accounting system, and complete re-engineering of all client management workflow systems.
Eco-Mail is a secure, scalable, Digital Post Office system that transforms incoming physical mail into powerful digital assets - at their point of entry to your business. We enable clients to streamline their operations, increase response times, improve their controls and compliance - and, by the way, save a huge amount of money. We're already helping one of America's three largest banks. We love to talk about digital mail, so email me direct if you like at [email protected]

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Robotic Process Automation is coming to your mail. - Eco Mail

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Okay, I admit it. Robots aren't coming to your office anytime soon - but Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is already here. Generally speaking, RPA is a way to use software robots to easily automate processes both within the same system and across multiple systems. RPA automates a lot of clerical processes which drives down costs, while also increasing the speed of processing and the quality of outcomes.

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Recently, I was talking about digital mail with a woman who runs compliance for a large financial institution. I was talking about the increased responsiveness, decreased cost and added controls of digital mail when she said, "Trust me. I get it. Physical mail is the wild west of compliance." Until then, I hadn't really thought about physical mail and compliance in such stark terms, but now - Trust me. I get it too.

Every form of digital communication pretty much automatically leaves fingerprints and bread crumbs everywhere it goes. Even if you didn't have a dedicated system for compliance communication, it wouldn't take much work to search your archives and figure out pretty much everywhere a document has been, who's seen it and what they've done with it.

Physical mail is a completely different story. Tracking is the exception, not the rule. It takes a well-defined process, a well-trained workforce, and a lot of time and labor to get any semblance of control...and no matter what you do, the process is subject to a multitude of errors. Lost mail, improper routing, bad or inconsistent judgement - these are just a few of the non-malicious errors that could happen.

Digitizing mail at the point of receipt eliminates many of these problems. Combining digitized mail with process automation can take you to places that you might have only imagined. A complete automated audit trail of every action taken by every person, automated KPI and SLA metrics, rules-based routing and distributed processing. All while improving your responsiveness and lowering your cost.

At the end of my discussion with the woman who runs compliance, we discovered there's one more big benefit to digitizing your compliance mail. She told me, "When the auditors come in and ask us for records about specific pieces of mail going back 12 or more months, it can take us weeks of effort to dig it all out." With our digital mail system, it would take less than 30 seconds!

The benefits of digital mail aren't limited to compliance mail. Mail is pretty much universal. It goes to almost every corner of every business - and everywhere it goes, it's slow to move, expensive to process, and difficult to track. Most of your communication has already gone digital but there are still more than 25 billion pieces of B2B physical mail every year. Isn't it time you cut off the "long tail" of physical mail and relegated it to the past - like the Pony Express and the Wild West?

Jay Maller is the founder and CEO of Eco-mail. He has 30+ years of management experience leading the design, development and implementation of financial products: prime brokerage, hedge fund, portfolio accounting, and fixed-income derivatives trading solutions. As Managing Director at Morgan Stanley, he led the development of the business' industry-leading client facing applications, proprietary multi-currency portfolio accounting system, and complete re-engineering of all client management workflow systems.
Eco-Mail is a secure, scalable, Digital Post Office system that transforms incoming physical mail into powerful digital assets - at their point of entry to your business. We enable clients to streamline their operations, increase response times, improve their controls and compliance - and, by the way, save a huge amount of money. We're already helping one of America's three largest banks. We love to talk about digital mail, so email me direct if you like at [email protected]

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Physical mail is the Wild West of compliance. - Eco Mail

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Recently, I was talking about digital mail with a woman who runs compliance for a large financial institution. I was talking about the increased responsiveness, decreased cost and added controls of digital mail when she said, "Trust me. I get it. Physical mail is the wild west of compliance."

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NEW YORK, April 11, 2019 - OPEX Corporation, a recognized global leader in innovative scanning and mailroom automation technologies, and Eco-Mail, a leader in software digital mail solutions, have partnered to provide an industry-leading digital mail solution to one of the top three banks in the United States.

The solution will eliminate virtually all distribution of inbound paper mail for this multi-national bank, while modernizing data extraction and workflow processing throughout their lines of business. OPEX® and Eco-Mail have delivered a digital mail solution that uniquely addresses the full range of pain points - spanning all mail types across all departments.

Once the mail is scanned using the OPEX FalconRED®, a universal document scanning workstation, Eco-Mail's platform transforms the images of the physical documents into sophisticated digital assets, powered by OCR and RPA technologies. Collectively, the solution:

- Drives significant cost savings;
- Improves flexibility & turnaround time;
- Enables document transparency;
- Increases data capture quality; and
- Enhances audit & compliance controls.

Within many industries, delivered mail remains a significant source of business-critical communication. The annual volume of first-class mail delivered in 2018 exceeded 56 billion pieces. In otherwise modern and digital organizations, inbound physical mail continues to drive significant cost, risk and inefficiency.

Mark Smith, Director of Strategic Alliances for OPEX, says, "We're excited to be working with our partner, Eco-Mail, to deliver a solution that modernizes the mailroom. The FalconRED® platform combines our innovative one-touch document scanner with the most efficient mail opening and extraction unit on the market. With this solution, the bank is going from sealed envelope to imaged contents in a single step."

Jay Maller, Founder & CEO of Eco-Mail, says, "Eco-Mail's EMX Enterprise was designed to extend the benefits of scanning and data extraction. By incorporating distribution and robotic process automation technology, EMX Enterprise reduces the labor, time and cost to process physical mail while enhancing audit, compliance and process controls."

Maller continues, "The net result is a data-driven platform for paper mail, enabling the benefits of digital transformation that organizations demand from every segment of their business." By working with OPEX, Eco-Mail was able to create a seamless bridge between physical and digitized mail, reduce prep time, enhance mail tracking and tightly integrate the hardware and software solutions.

"OPEX's dedicated FalconRED® dramatically increases the efficiency of opening and scanning mixed mail types," notes Maller.

As businesses worldwide strive for digital transformation, and as the definition of the traditional office is redefined, the costly process of physically sorting and delivering mail is being replaced by technology-driven digital mailroom solutions. This combination of OPEX and Eco-Mail provides organizations the flexibility to quickly route vital paper-mail-based information to decision makers with the speed and efficiency of digital.

"In working with a global financial institution," says Maller, "we knew we needed to partner with OPEX to deliver the maximum efficiency and reliability. We look forward to working with OPEX on a broad range of implementations, across industries. With OPEX's excellence in hardware and Eco-Mail's excellence in software, we can drive complete digital transformation of physical mail for our clients."

About OPEX
OPEX Corporation is a recognized global technology leader in high-speed mailroom solutions, document imaging, and warehouse automation. Since 1973, OPEX has provided performance-enhancing workflows and cost-effective results to thousands of organizations around the world. Today, OPEX systems are installed in financial services, healthcare, government, non-profit, utility, service bureau, insurance, telecommunications and university/educational marketplaces around the world. For more information visit, www.opex.com

About Eco-Mail
Eco-Mail is the leading, scalable platform for transforming physical mail into digital assets, enabling electronic distribution, delivery, accountability, and integration with existing systems. By approaching physical mail as a strategic problem, Eco-Mail delivers company-wide benefits, far beyond the mailroom. With the EMX Enterprise solution, Eco-Mail drives major cost savings, improves audit and compliance controls, and makes entire businesses faster, more flexible and more customer responsive. To learn more about Eco-Mail, visit www.eco-mail.com

Contacts

Eco-Mail Media Contact
Henry MacConnel
914-214-7604
[email protected]
Eco-Mail is a secure, scalable, Digital Post Office system that transforms incoming physical mail into powerful digital assets - at their point of entry to your business. We enable clients to streamline their operations, increase response times, improve their controls and compliance - and, by the way, save a huge amount of money. We're already helping one of America's three largest banks. We love to talk about digital mail, so email me direct if you like at [email protected]

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OPEX and Eco-Mail Modernize Physical B2B Mail for Top Bank - Eco Mail

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NEW YORK, April 11, 2019 - OPEX Corporation, a recognized global leader in innovative scanning and mailroom automation technologies, and Eco-Mail, a leader in software digital mail solutions, have partnered to provide an industry-leading digital mail solution to one of the top three banks in the United States.