How about the mail arrives, junk is binned, the residue is scanned and the
hardcopy immediately binned? If you are going to distribute electronically,
why not declare the electronic copy the master record as early as possible
in the process? it brings it into line with all those emails and phone
calls by which your company probably does most of its business anyway. Why
is mail any different?

Look to the process - and look for consistency regardless of medium.

Secondly, I see lots of plusses in RM doing this function, to me it's all
part of processing and distributing documents and records, again regardless
of the medium. So the first thing you do, even before you set up procedures,
is rename the function to "Document Distribution" and kill off the words
"mail" and especially "mailroom" (if it's in use at your company). Mail is
just one source of documents (so are couriers, fax, email, and carrier
pigeon). A mailroom is where people process stuff, it's not who they are or
what they do.

Turn it to your favour - redefine it, publicise it, do it your way.

Our procedures are so simple we haven't written them down. Stuff arrives, if
it's got a name on it we sort it into pigeonholes unopened, if we must we
open it to figure out who to send it to. We distribute it a couple of
scheduled times a day, using red trolleys (red is, of course, faster) and
collect outgoing and internal stuff for distribution at the same time. You
may also need a security check somewhere if you are worried about things
with wires and batteries inside, or funny white powders.

From this you can see that our RM Policy is that business units decide what
to register and if necessary put on a hardcopy file. That ripples through
into all our procedures, staffing setup, budget, end user training
programs etc. It's also impacted by having 4,000 staff in 35 sites, and even
in Head Office, we service 30 floors of two buildings, most with four or
five drop points. Next year we move to a new Head Office with 15 floors each
with one drop point, and I immediately need one less staffer pushing
trolleys around.

And I'm pushing electronic rather than pushing trolleys - I've approved for
example as ok from an RM aspect, accounts payable procedures where incoming
invoices are scanned (not by us, by AP) and the hardcopy binned. With
scanning, plus electronic billing and funds transfer, thats a couple of
hundred pieces of paper a day we don't have to file and store.

Glenn

Glenn Sanders
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Australia

These views are mine alone. They may or may not be those of any
previous or present employers or clients. I don't know. If I'd asked
and they'd agreed, I would have signed it "Harry Peck and Co and
Glenn". Or whatever. But I haven't, so I didn't.

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