IOOF

Outsourcing electronic mailroom activities to Decipha has made good business sense for one of Australia's largest fund managers, IOOF.

The following article was published in the April / May 2006 edition of Priority Magazine.

Large quantities of incoming mail are an important - and labour-intensive - reality for many organisations. Each day thousands of workplaces around Australia receive large quantities of mail, including business correspondence, cheques, application forms and Reply Paid responses. Being one of Australia's large fund managers, IOOF has to handle sizeable quantities of incoming mail.

"Each business day we receive a range of hard-copy communications, including cheques, transfer requests, amendments, withdrawals, insurance documents - all of them needing to be dealt with according to the very specific operational requirements of our business," explains Beverley Draper, IOOF Service Manager, Investment Products.

After years of handling this function itself, IOOF decided to outsource the operation of its incoming mail to Decipha, a business of Australia Post. Decipha met with IOOF to customise a solution that included handling IOOF's incoming mail at Decipha's Victorian site. It also includes clearing a number of post office boxes on behalf of IOOF, and the receipt, sorting, data capture (where required) and delivery of both hard-copy communications and scanned data at IOOF.

All of IOOF's incoming cheques are data captured by Decipha by 9.45 a.m. and banked by 3.30 p.m. that day. "This is a great time saver for us and also provides an important record of payments received by this method," says Beverley.

Decipha Account Manager Ben Ferrier explains: "Because each business has different needs, our solutions are tailored. We make it easy for an organisation to select the exact services they need and then we integrate the solution into the business.

"We also realise that customers require complete confidentiality and security when outsourcing the handling of their mail. We provide this with our high-security, off-site operation, which is ISO 9001:2000 accredited."

According to Beverley, one of the key benefits of outsourcing the work to Decipha has been faster turnaround times for dealing with incoming communications. "Mail is sorted and scanned by Decipha from 7 a.m. and is available in our systems by 10.30 a.m.," she says. "This has increased our efficiency and ability to meet financial deadlines."