Docufree Launches Latest Enterprise Digital Mailroom Solution – Learn More
Docufree Launches Latest Enterprise Digital Mailroom Solution – Learn More
Docufree’s Enterprise Digital Mailroom enabled a global logistics company to solve its remote mail challenges, driving efficiency and delivering a six-figure return on investment
Industry: Transportation
Location: Corporate Headquarters
Docufree Services: Enterprise Digital Mailroom
For one international logistics and transportation company, growing its business footprint while supporting a commitment to a remote-work environment meant the traditional process of delivering corporate mail to the right department in a timely fashion across the enterprise had grown increasingly inefficient and ineffective. The company offers a comprehensive suite of fleet-management solutions to some of the world’s most-recognized brandsthroughout the United States, Mexico, and Canada. In addition, the company manages nearly 250,000 commercial vehicles, services fleets at 760 maintenance locations, and operates nearly 300 warehouses encompassing more than 100 million square feet—making corporate mail delivery that much more complex.
“The problem we were looking to solve was twofold,” said the company’s Head of Intelligent Automation. “One was we made a corporate decision to go to a remote-work environment which meant we didn’t have the luxury of staying with a process where you’ve got a mailroom and mail is manually delivered by cart in each building. Secondly, the company is very specific about return on investment, so we weren’t going to implement a digital mail solution unless there was a business reason for it. Now, we had a legitimate business problem: There wasn’t an efficient way to get the right mail to the right person in a remote environment.”
After initially going remote, the company tried a combination of things to make mail delivery more efficient. Leadershiphad people drive into its headquarters’ location, work a day or half a day so they could retrieve the mail, review it and take action, for example processing checks or initiating work that needed to get done as a result of information contained in a specific mail item. The process often involved manually sending a box full of mail, once or twice a week via USPS, UPS or FedEx, to another hub location or even to actual people who worked somewhere else.
“With the staff’s administration time, shipping costs and the loss in productivity because of delaysor the occasional missing piece of mail, I would estimate that the company was spending thousands of dollars in real costs per month, not to mention just the headache and soft costs associated with that process. It just wasn’t sustainable,” said the Head of Intelligent Automation.
He knew the companyneeded a partner that had a powerful and customizable, yet easy-to-use, platform that allowed the mail to be scanned, indexed and routed—a process similar to how Microsoft Outlook Mail operates.
He turned to Docufree, a trusted partner that had been working with the company since 2005. During that time, Docufree had successfully taken on a number of mission-critical, document-management functions involving accounts payable, trip records, and HR. Hefelt confident in extending the partnership to include Docufree’s Enterprise Digital Mailroom to solve the company’s problems.
Previous to joining the logistics and transportation company, the Head of Intelligent Automation had helped manage a digital mail solution at American Express, so he was quite familiar with the routing and workflows for large volumes of inbound mail, not to mention that he was quite experienced with scanning and indexing from his previous career at a bank. Hewas familiar with the costs associated with these solutions, so he knew that partnering with a local, smaller, more nimble company like Docufree—versus a larger technology conglomerate—was more cost effective.
Docufree’s pricing, flexibility and ability to meet the company’s initial requirements to get off the ground quickly helped solidify the contract.
The Head of Intelligent Automation required that the digital mailroom solution be fully cloud-based because he didn’t want to worry about installing anything or involving the infrastructure and technology teams inside the company.
“The onboarding, the initial launch, was relatively quick,” he said. “Being able to demo, test and see the solution in action all took place within a month. The demos were especially insightful in terms of helping us understand how the tool would work. We had even mapped some of our basic processes to it. Sostarting the onboard process and getting the mail ingestedquickly was definitely a huge benefit. All the credit goes to Docufree’s digital and physical mail teams.”
The company uses Docufree’s shared-service center in Alpharetta, Ga., where a team physically opens, scans and indexes its physical mail. “They have decades of legacy paper-handling experience, so we didn’t have to buy and maintain a $50,000 piece of equipment just for scanning or worry about designing any of those document-management processes. They had all those things already in place which, in turn, allowed us to onboard so quickly,” he added.
The company was able to work with the Docufree team to customize the solution in order to create a shared departmental digital mailbox—one where multiple users within a department could see and share mail. That customization took between 90 to 120 days to get built, but during those first 30 to 45 days, the company was onboarding and already digitizing mail. The company wanted all 25 departments to come online simultaneously so that everyone’s work processes were taking place in parallel.
“We weren’t worried about the digital mailroom solution notworking; we were more concerned about administering the change management,” he said. “Instead of implementing change management for one department at a time, we went whole hog so we could get everyone together on weekly calls, explain how the processes work, support them, and make sure they were able to log in as well as use the necessary features and functions properly. It was a little bit more volume than we might have welcomed, but we were extremelycomfortable with Docufree and its vast document-management experience.”
The Head of Intelligent Automationestimates that the total cost-savings the company has already achieved has more than paid for Docufree’s Enterprise Digital Mailroom solution.
“We were able to support the decommission and movement of our headquarters much more quickly and without any further investment in the change management associated with moving our corporate mail center to a shared-service center in a different state where Docufree picks up the mail every day and digitizes it,” he said. “It might have been close to a six-figure project to spin up a team and figure out ways to effectively deliver departmental mail without a traditional headquarters.Docufree made our move out of headquarters into a number of smaller locations much easier because most of the heavy lifting had already been done.”
Since the launch of the project in Q4 2023, Docufree’s Enterprise Digital Mailroom solution has delivered these results for the logistics and transportation company:
The best part of the solution—and really the total digital mailroom experience—has been how Docufree conducts its customer support.
“The fact that we’re not just a numberand have accessto an integrated team to helpresolve any issues is a tremendous benefit,” he said. “We have a point person who can put us directly in touch to any of the various support teams at Docufree.”
As more of the company’s business partners become more digital, such as governmental entities that issue tolls, parking tickets, permits, and utility bills, etc., the Head of Intelligent Automation believes the company will be well ahead of the curve in terms of being prepared to handle that transition.
“You could say Docufree’s Enterprise Digital Mailroom is an enabler of digital transformation because it has helped us remove paper from our processes,” he said. “We can easily integrate with a municipality or a trading partner that will circumvent them sending us a piece of paper mail that we then have to ingest. We’ve already got those processes worked out digitally.”
In closing he added, “Docufree delivered the core requirements that we needed without overselling and over-engineering its digital mailroom solution. We’re quite happy with the cost-versus-capability framework as well as the service that’s being provided.”
“You could say Docufree’s Enterprise Digital Mailroom is an enabler of digital transformation because it has helped us remove paper from our processes.”
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