Running a business like this has a variety of challenges: keeping costs down, yet ensuring that the business is efficient and flexible. We've found over the years that paying attention to the simple things has always been important to enabling our business to grow and prosper. One of these simple things is how to handle inbound old-fashioned post coming to a company address, and then being able to get that mail quickly and securely to the right people to handle it.

We've been scanning mail into a Notes database for years, but as the company grew, the manual process was increasingly untenable, and we had to find a better way. And so we did.

Apart from running the business, we like cooking. We saw the solution to these issues like cooking; use the best ingredients, simple and fresh, and cook them together carefully until you get the perfect dish. So let's follow that through, and look at how we cooked our inbound post process -- which combines scanning, barcodes, and Lotus Notes. Let's start by looking in a bit more detail at the ingredients.

Lotus Notes "Indocs" databases
We use a simple database design for storing items of incoming correspondence and making them available to staff. We call the database type "Indocs". Later we'll discuss the basic information we record for each item received.

You need to think through the risk areas associated with incoming post and then decide how complicated (or otherwise) your procedures need to be. Some of the key risks we identified are the possibility of items getting overlooked or accidentally combined, which we addressed by some pre-scanning preparation procedures, and the need to limit access for reasons of confidentiality to different staff levels.

We dealt with the confidentiality one very simply. We just use multiple Indocs databases, one for each level of access required. For example, all our post gets added to a Postroom Indocs database in the first instance, and a select group of management staff have access thereto. Once post is available in that database, staff members with access to it go through a distribution process which moves items into other Indocs databases as appropriate.