Coley Clark, CEO, BancTec
Today’s post is from Coley Clark, BancTec’s chairman of the board and chief executive officer.
This year marks BancTec’s 40th anniversary, and I would like to take a minute to recall how our company’s beginnings can be traced to torn checks.
It was 1972, the year President Nixon started the space shuttle program and Elton John topped the charts with “Rocket Man.” HBO launched its first subscription cable service as the BBC introduced the legendary quiz show Mastermind, known for its challenging questions and intimidating set.
Advancements in technology were taking hold, and automation was mastering any number of business tasks, among them check processing. But checks mutilated by machines couldn’t be quickly processed, and in that problem Merle Volding saw an opportunity. For less than $10,000, he purchased a stake in a Dallas company that had been unable to capitalize on its patent for repairing a damaged check by attaching a strip of paper to it using heat-sensitive adhesives.
Soon that company was BancTec, whose name highlights its technological expertise in the banking industry. And just a year after Volding founded BancTec, its first CheckMender system was installed in the Republic Bank of Dallas. The product proved successful, in part because it used a heat-sensitive adhesive that dried in milliseconds.
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Today’s post is from Coley Clark, BancTec’s chairman of the board and chief executive officer.
This year is a special one for BancTec as we celebrate our 40th anniversary and reflect on the experience we’ve gained on the way to becoming a leading provider of financial transaction automation and document management services.
Our company began in a time of technological transition. Innovations of the day included the digital watch, the hand-held scientific calculator, and Pong, the first commercially viable video game. They all arrived in 1972, just as BancTec started designing and manufacturing check-repair and related systems for the banking industry.
Though we claimed the name BancTec to highlight our technological expertise in banking, our company aggressively expanded to hardware as well as software solutions used in a wide range of industries. The experience we’ve gained managing payment processing and document processing has given us an in-depth understanding of a myriad of client businesses. Since 1999, we’ve offered our Intelligent BPO services, now our primary focus and fastest-growing business segment.
We all take pride in the fact that today BancTec serves clients in 50 countries and operates 19 BPO centers around the world, automating processes for Fortune 500 and mid-size companies. We’re successfully leveraging our proprietary IP and deep expertise to deliver focused solutions across the financial services, insurance, healthcare, utility, transportation and government sectors.
After 40 years, its employees are keeping BancTec on the leading edge of technology and electronically transforming businesses processes in the era of the Internet, the tablet computer and the smartphone. I see this anniversary less as a milestone and more as a reflection of our experience. While 40 years in business is worth celebrating, it’s our 40 years of experience that matters.
Which is more efficient: Delivering mountains of mail by cart throughout your facility or one inbound mail process doing document management work for everyone?
Processing high volumes of inbound mail by hand can be slow and expensive. A digital system recognizes forms, letters, invoices and other content and feeds them directly into the appropriate business processes. That kind of efficiency cuts costs and delays.
Adding Financial Flexibility
For example, instant processing of supplier invoices gives the accounting department the flexibility to process payments in a manner that best benefits the company. Accounts payable can be paid according to available cash flow, “early payment” discounts and other variables.
Manual processing is often too slow to give companies that flexibility.
Digitizing mail—capturing the content and indexing it for searchability—puts it right into the process flow and makes it visible to the right managers when they need it.
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The last thing a CEO wants to hear is, “Our marketing campaign is so successful that we have to stop it.” Or, “We need to stop growing until our mailroom can catch up.”
Is your mailroom too full, or getting there fast?
Communications from customers are vital — orders, warranties, loyalty programs, surveys, returns, complaints, rebates, coupons — and have to be processed quickly and efficiently.
But what does efficiency look like, and how do you get there?
Choose Your Strategy
Companies need a strategy for handling “too much” mail.
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Is your business trying to improve efficiency and define business processes? Mailrooms don’t have to be the last bastion of utter inefficiency. An automated inbound mail process can optimize processes and workflows throughout your business.
Organizations differ, but yours may find even more benefits of transforming your mountains of paper.
Let’s start with these seven:
1. Easy, instant transport
Mail that is scanned and converted to a digital format can be transported and routed anywhere in the world instantly.
2. Virtual data storage
Digital content can be archived quickly, efficiently and takes up very little space.
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Implementing digital mailroom solutions can result in significant process improvements and real return on investment.
But inbound mail processing doesn’t happen overnight. Once centers are up and running, there is a optimization process that needs to take place: Observe, Orient, Decide and Act, or OODA. It’s a step-by-step process of continual adjustments and optimization.
Key Areas of Optimization
Optimizing the digital mailroom once it is created is often done to meet new challenging service level agreements, reduce costs, improve delivery or to improve the utilization of operators.
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