While a set place of work or at least a postbox were the rule in a company in the old days, things have changed radically in recent years. “You can hardly find a banker with a pigeon hole nowadays,” says Axel Rautschka, Managing Director of Rhenus Mailroom Services. “Instead, there are mobile workstations everywhere. Employees work where there is a free space.” This is compounded by the fact that employees are more often on the road and sometimes work from home too.

How do employees gain access to their post quickly?  “We can offer a digital solution to our customers for this,” Rautschka reveals. The Rhenus subsidiary takes over the mailroom business – something that customers would normally operate themselves. “We ensure that the post is processed, sorted and digitalised in line with needs and then reaches the correct recipients”

The same applies to processing “info” mail accounts or digital or physical items of mail that cannot be directly assigned to any particular person. The core expertise at Rhenus consists in classifying recipient information and the content of items of mail – on the basis of certain rules and supported by databases.

Digitalisation of post
As soon as the mail arrives at the post office, a Rhenus driver picks it up. Pre-sorting then takes place, because couriers continue to deliver some documents like letters to the management board, the works council or the personnel department directly to the recipients in the customer’s departments.

However, Rhenus digitalises’ the lion’s share of the items of mail. It uses special software for this; it scans the documents and makes the items available via a web-based service or as PDF files within the customer’s system in line with an agreed indexing procedure. “Employees can then log in from anywhere in the world at any time of the day and process their mail.”

The specialists at Rhenus Mailroom Services are also developing their own web interface that is designed to offer customers even more services in future. “The Rhenus Easy Mailbox will have additional functions like tracking and inform customers by mail if new items have arrived in their incoming mailbox.”

Rhenus Mailroom Services

Rhenus Mailroom Services has been taking over and operating mailrooms for its customers for more than 15 years. The Rhenus subsidiary has eight service centres in Germany. The company can also handle the complete mail logistics at a customers’ premises. Its customers include banks, insurance companies, pharmaceutical and automobile firms, for example.

Sifting, checking, processing
In addition to business mail, Rhenus Mailroom Services also provides checks and processes customers’ mail fully automatically – for example, in the field of data administration. After all, the volume of mail at large companies is huge. If the customer reports a change in their address details to an insurance company, the letter is fed into the system and the relevant data is transferred to the insurance company electronically.

“Our employee then checks whether the data transmission has worked and then sends confirmation to the customer that the address data has been changed. The insurance company can focus on other tasks in the meantime - then.” The intelligent, self-learning Rhenus system can even prepare a response letter after scanning the incoming letter; this just needs to be submitted to the customer for a final review.