This interview originally aired on Business RadioX.
David Winkler, executive vice president and chief product officer at Docufree, talks with Atlanta Business Radio’s Lee Kantor about next-generation Enterprise Digital Mailroom solutions that are completely re-imagining mail management—propelling the traditional mailroom into the digital age, aligning it with the demands of modern business operations. The following is the full transcript:
Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by Kennesaw State University’s Executive MBA program, the accelerated degree program for working professionals looking to advance their career and enhance their leadership skills. And now, here’s your host.
Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Kennesaw State University’s Executive MBA program. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio, we have David Winkler with Docufree. Welcome.
David Winkler: Hi, Lee. Glad to be with you. Thank you.
Lee Kantor: Excited to learn what you’re up to. For those who aren’t familiar, can you share a little bit about Docufree?
David Winkler: Absolutely. Docufree is based in Alpharetta, and we’ve been in business here now for 25-plus years. We employ approximately 500, give or take a few employees in the Alpharetta area. We’re heavily involved with digitization of paper-based documents, as well as processing electronic documents for a number of, you know, a number of corporations, over 1,600 corporations across the United States. So, we mainly focused here on U.S. business. A lot of business in the Atlanta area, of course, and you know the entire East Coast of the U.S.
Lee Kantor: And one of the areas you kind of focus in on is kind of the corporate mailroom. Can you share a little bit about, you know, the importance of transforming that corporate mailroom? Because a lot of people probably take it for granted and don’t put much thought into that part of the business.
David Winkler: Very, very true. So most folks, I’m sure, are very familiar with the challenges of just working with paper-based information and the challenges that it presents—the lack of efficiency for your employees, partners, and trading partners, let alone the implications it poses for information security, privacy and compliance. And as we all know, we still receive a lot of documents and paper-based information via the mailstream, whether it’s coming through the U.S. Postal Service mailstream, or whether it’s coming via couriers, whether it’s UPS, FedEx, etc. And, you know, we’ve been trying to deal with and corporations are still struggling with, removing or reducing paper-based information from their business processes, for quite some time now. So the mail room is where a lot of that paper enters, whether it’s an invoice from a customer, whether it’s a piece of legal correspondence related to your business or whether it’s insurance related, etc. As we all know, business is run based on documents or the backbone of business, so a lot of volume still comes in through a mailroom. If you’re a larger enterprise, you most likely have a centralized mail type function and perhaps even some distributed offices, right, that are also handling mail. So as we move, you know, businesses from a document-centric and how they deal to a more data-centric world, the importance of digitizing that mailstream and getting the information from those documents extracted and injected into the right line of business system that you use and support is really, really important. So the mailroom is a very important function to your company.
Lee Kantor: Now, can you give us an idea of the scope of the opportunity here? Like what percentage of invoices or checks or physical invoices? Physical checks are actually mailed back and forth or communicated that way rather than digitally.
David Winkler: Still, surprisingly, even in this day and age, a surprising number of documents still come in physically through the mail, especially if you’re a highly regulated business, right? If you have to do regulatory mandatory mailings as part of your business offering, you’re going to be most likely sending a version of that through email or electronically. But you’re also going to be required to send through the mail, whether it’s even a simple postcard or whether it’s, you know, a traditional No.10 envelope with, you know, with the contents in there. There’s been various studies on this, but it’s still anywhere from, looking at a process like AP invoicing, as an example. You’ve still got north of 50 percent of those coming in through the mailstream physically, right?
Lee Kantor: I mean, I’m sure the listeners, especially the younger ones, are, you know, they’re really shocked by that number because most of their transactions are digital.
David Winkler: Yeah, it’s surprising. Right? Especially when you when you look at it, a lot of people are, you know, familiar with accessing, you know, through mobile devices, whether it’s your cell phone, or whether it’s a, you know, a tablet or even a, you know, a laptop computer. You’re doing a lot of things electronically, obviously. Right. You can go on to a furniture store online and buy something, you know, etc. But you look at the supply chain that supports that purchase, right? There’s probably two or three businesses in the supply chain that are either mailing some type of document or they’re printing it out physically. You’d be surprised. On multi-function printing devices, let alone standalone devices. Copies of what you thought you did are entirely 100-percent electronically are still being printed out. I don’t know if you’ve had the opportunity to buy a big-ticket item, but let’s just let’s just talk about buying a home or buying an automobile. You go into a dealership. You may think you’re sitting there filling everything out online with some dealers are very advanced. The reality is, again, that information is getting printed at somewhere along in that transaction and has to be captured and data elements fed into ancillary subsystems along the line. So don’t be fooled by the fact that you think you’re doing it 100-percent online, that the entire supply chain is online because it’s not.
Lee Kantor: Now for you, when you’re working with your clients, is there a size where it becomes, the mailroom becomes an issue where it’s like, you know, this wasn’t a big deal when we were this size. But now that we’re this new size, this is becoming now a problem where it was just something that we were, I guess, tolerating.
David Winkler: You know, we have clients in, you know, from small- to mid-sized clients. Employee wise, we’ve got, running our digital mail service, less than 50 employees all the way up to very large organizations. Fortune 500, right, with, you know, thousands and tens of thousands of employees. So there’s not a sweet spot, right, that has developed that says, okay, you know, you’ve got to be a large organization to benefit from this. We’re seeing in the legal industry, for example, law firms that are adopting this technology. And, they are, you know, they’re not very large from an employee-size perspective, but they’re dealing with information and workers, in particular, in their office are distributed. They’re highly distributed. And the information is distributed. They’re getting information physically through the mail, but they’re also getting it electronically, you know, feeds from court systems, as an example, from multiple jurisdictions, counties and states that all has to be pulled together and integrated into their case-management application and fed in there. So, you know, legal is an industry that, we’re seeing a lot of traction in that doesn’t have a big employee base. You look at the transportation industry, you know, we have a Fortune-500 client in the transportation space as an example, and they literally shut down their corporate mailroom and re-allocated those employees to other areas throughout their facility department. And now they rely 100-percent on our Docufree digital-mail platform. And we’re distributing their mail now digitally. Even that mail that came in through the U.S. Postal service. They now look at their mail totally online. Right. So we’ve, you know, essentially made their information as mobile as their workforce is. So there’s not one size that’s in particular. This technology scales very nicely from small to mid-size to very large environments.
Lee Kantor: So what happens when, like you mentioned that some of these industries are, you know, 50 percent are still dealing with paper. How does it work when all of a sudden now you’re working with one of the players in those industries and they’re not dealing with paper? Can they still play nicely with the ones that are?
David Winkler: Yeah, that’s what’s really, really nice about, what the advances in technology have given us, especially with artificial intelligence as well. You now have the ability to seamlessly integrate your physical information with your electronic information and marry that up so that you can now present a unified view of the information. And you can leverage technology such as workflow to route and distribute, then have different constituents take action on the mail that you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do. You know, I suppose in contrast with mailstreams and mail of the olden days, still a lot of companies are doing this. You might be a company that delivers pouch mail to distributed offices, and you might, do interoffice mail. Now, if you remember the old envelopes, right? With interoffice mail and routing, you route a piece of correspondence to somebody, stick it in their office envelope, and you can, you know, track who they route it to, and you want them to take action on certain things. You can now do all that electronically, right. And all you need is an internet connection, which is the beautiful thing. And so it makes it really, really nice. I think a lot of organizations that again, you know, thought of digital mail in the past as, oh, it’s you just turn paper documents, you know, scan them, OCR them and store them. But the reality is, it’s digital mail of today, in the modern era. It completely unifies that information to where you can now take action on it. And from a workflow and your task and queue management over mail—there are accountability tracking features. You can insert critical or transactional mail into a line of business system and have total chain of custody right from the moment of receipt. Those are things that the technology platform enables you to do in this modern era.
Lee Kantor: And it sounds like, like mail isn’t, doesn’t have to be this physical old thing. It’s really communication at the heart of this, and you’re trying to give as many people this transparent communication as quickly as possible.
David Winkler: Great point. It is all about communications and the information exists in so many different file formats and structures and places. You know, most would think of the past, right? As you know, you’re physically mailing it. But now you can literally capture all this information. You can leverage technology to extrapolate key information, only certain elements or fields or even such things as we’re leveraging artificial intelligence, right, to redact certain information that came in from that mailstream. Let’s say it’s a release of information request from a healthcare perspective, and you need to redact the personally identifiable information on that physical document, as well as the PDF document that came in through a fax gateway. You can do that with digital mail, and you can now secure it. So only those with the authorization credentials to view it can view it. You know, it’s just incredible what the technology allows you to do and how you can intelligently deliver mail like you’ve never been able to do in the mailroom of the past.
Lee Kantor: Now, from the people who are still doing it kind of the old way, what are some of the things that they’re dealing with and just tolerating that they don’t have to tolerate, if maybe they were aware of this type of a service?
David Winkler: Well, we hear it quite often. Some of the, you know, the pain that organizations still have, right, is critical documents get lost in the mail. We’re all familiar with that phrase. Well, the check’s in the mail, right? Checks get lost in the mail, and when checks get lost in the mail, that’s revenue. It’s money. So digitizing that information and capturing not only who it’s coming from and the amount and the microline and all the information about that, but then making sure that that transaction gets deposited where it needs to go. You eliminate that risk or that pain when you have a digital-mail platform. So again, critical documents getting delayed or getting lost or left unsecured from a compliance standpoint. Those are some of the biggest pain points that we hear from customers. Who, you know, are not sure or not familiar with digital mail per se. But how digital mail might be able to help them or benefit their business such as driving costs out and increasing accountability for the mailstream.
David Winkler: When you look at your organization and how the world works nowadays, it is it is a new world of work out there. And legacy inbound-mail processes just struggle to keep up with today’s mobile workforce. You have people still, even though I know we’re post-COVID pandemic per se, even though COVID’s not gone, but a lot of people have returned to work, but they still have flexible work arrangements or they’re truly, you know, mobile workers, right? They’re traveling for business etc. Digital mail is ideal for that problem. How do you get that information, whether you’re in an office for two out of five days a week and you’re working from home or hoteling the rest of the time. That’s something that we’re hearing as well, right? You’re frustrated with not only lost misplaced mail, you don’t have any level of tracking or accountability. No audit trail to your mail, and you have a distributed workforce that you need to deal with. These are all things that we hear from companies that are ideal for a digital mail platform.
Lee Kantor: Yeah, I would imagine. I mean, when you talk about it, it becomes obvious that this improves the speed to communication, which in turn improves the speed to action which everybody is for. Like no one wants us to be slower and take more time to do stuff that we can be doing faster. And this to me is a no-brainer when it comes to, you know, the speed to take to make a decision because you have the information in the hands of the people who need it in the form that they need it as quickly as possible.
David Winkler: Precisely. And if you think about, you know, from a customer-engagement standpoint, right. Customers are critical to businesses and how you engage them, how you fulfill them, the speed, as you pointed out, that you can do that, you know, servicing them, growing your revenue, you know, reducing your exposure of risk. And, the handling and distribution of individual pieces of mail, you know, letters, orders, contracts, POS etc. Many times they represent a very weak link between you and the customer in that whole chain, right. So are significant time delays to look stuff up, to handle paper, paper management costs, you know—they’re all barriers to cycle time and speed. So the more you can collaborate. Make decisions faster, more precise. Eliminate the manual and duplication and physical logistics. The happier your customer is going to be. You know, back to your point. It’s all about speed, throughput, accuracy, and it’s all about reducing that weakest link between you and servicing your customer.
Lee Kantor: Now, is there a story you can share that maybe illustrates this? Maybe share? You obviously don’t name the company, but share the challenge they had. And when they engaged with Docufree, how they were able to get to a new level.
David Winkler: Absolutely. We have a very large personal-injury client. I think it’s the largest personal injury law firm in the country, depending on a given week. But, they dealt with numerous challenges of physical mail, not only the archives and things taking up precious real estate and space that they needed to expand to support, you know, additional attorneys, etc., but they were dealing with a high number of distributed. Offices. I think 60-plus downstream locations from their headquarters. They also dealt with multiple paralegals and, you know, turnover and that process as well. And so they were getting stuff lost, you know, literally in the mail. They were spending a significant amount of money in overnighting things between their offices or, you know, FedEx type expenses. They also had the issue of, you know, dealing with criminal-court systems between multiple counties and, you know, differing states. So the physical mailstream was an issue. But their electronic mail that came in via would get stuff with file attachments. They would get stuff sent in via facsimile. So this different information coming from multiple disparate sources. They really struggled with that. Right. And their costs were just difficult to control. And so they engaged us to help digitize that. You know, we focused on the process first, followed by the technology enablement.
David Winkler: That really helped them get a really good handle on the baseline, on what it was costing them to process the mail. And then once we said, hey, here’s how we could intervene in this process and lean it out, so to speak, and make some tweaks to it. Here’s how we can, you know, centralize the capture of the mail. The people that you had, you know, before they were doing their own scanning, but then having people manually key in information from, you know, at the index level and other systems, we showed them how we can automate that, how we can extrapolate that to feed those ancillary systems directly. You can essentially eliminate that task, that step in the workflow and, you know, apply the automation intelligently, right—as you lean this process out. So they tell us today, they don’t know how they could operate without us. Right. Essentially. Now, fortunately for them, they were a client of ours, you know, about a year and a half before COVID hit. And when COVID hit, they immediately, you know, sent people home. They tell us they don’t know how they could have done it right without this platform. So they’ve seen clearly the benefits they continue to, you know, acquire and grow in their business and, are very, very happy with the result. So we’ve got other clients that, you know, have a similar scenario where they’ve just been dealing and struggling with, the amount of paper-based information and how they integrate it with the electronic information.
David Winkler: And we’ve got, like I say, companies as small as five employees on this platform. Then we also have a very large transportation-distribution company, a Fortune 500 company that literally shut down its corporate mailroom and has now gone entirely on a digital platform. And they absolutely love it. They love it, especially, they’re using it in the human resource area, in HR. They’re using it in their accounts-payable function. So many, many different examples, which is really the nice. The nice thing about digital mail is the use cases, across industries, are, you know, very common such as banking, financial services using it for account statements and account agreements, and credit appraisals. We see healthcare organizations using it for insurance, applications insurance cards, patient records, you know, paying your invoices—everything from prescriptions etc. We’re seeing it in the travel and hospitality, you know, invoices, itineraries, reservation confirmations. Also manufacturing. Really key. Right? Bill of materials, component catalogs, inventories, shipping tags, supplier lists, you name it. The use cases are very, very broad. So it’s very applicable across multiple industry segments because mail is one of those kind of those horizontal aspects that, you know, every business has to deal with it.
Lee Kantor: Now, David, if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what’s the website? What’s the best way to connect?
David Winkler: Go to Docufree.com. Our website has all the information you need. You can look at case studies on this. You can look at, you know, information briefings, sheets. It’s very easy to, you know, click and contact somebody. And we’ll have one of our professional consulting executives, talk to you. We’d love to have a conversation with you. We’ve even done webinars. I think there’s a recorded webinar out there on that, but I would direct them to our website. That’s probably the best place to go. A wealth of information out there on this offering and what it’s capable of.
Lee Kantor: Well, David, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.
David Winkler: Thank you. Lee. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today.
Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.
You can also listen to the full audio interview here.
