Deutsche Post (German Post Office)

With its MR.KNOW – BPM (formerly BPM inspire) suite, process management specialist Inspire Technologies is providing a core technology for the Digital Incoming Mail Service (DiPS) business area at Deutsche Post. The incoming mail digitalisation product is a Deutsche Post value-added service which relieves companies of document processing and digitalizes incoming mail as soon as it is received. Because of the increasing importance of digital processes, the service is expanding at increasing speed – for example, the environmental bonus with which the German government promoted the purchase of new passenger cars resulted in a huge mountain of paper. More than 20 million pages have to be scanned in at the Deutsche Post digitalization centres just to process the applications. This is just one reason why the project is currently undergoing a considerable expansion, and services such as automatic classification and content recognition have been added. The MR.KNOW – BPM suite is at the heart of the management of complex processes and the processing of these immense mountains of information.

Companies have been able to have their daily incoming mail digitalized by Deutsche Post and delivered via data transmission since November 2006. Invoices, complaints, orders, forms and other correspondence are sent directly to the companies in digital form. On the same morning that a customer inquiry is received it can be processed from any of a company's locations – even if it was sent to a central address. Deutsche Post helps companies to achieve significant cost and quality benefits by making documents digitally available at an early stage, and improving the processing procedures. After a document has been scanned in at the inbox, the service can automatically classify the documents, either according to orders, invoices and complaints or according to sender data, customer numbers, order numbers and invoice numbers. This service allows the digitalized letters to be subsequently assigned to individual departments, case handlers and customer records. At the same time, the classification represents the basis for outsourcing entire business processes, such as accounts payable or complaints management. One of main requirements that Deutsche Post had for the process management solution for digitalizing incoming mail was future-proofing: It had to be easy to integrate new services. Due to the modular structure and outstanding flexibility of MR.KNOW – BPM this is possible without any problems. Since the introduction of the service, new features such as content classification or the reading of documents have been added and seamlessly integrated into the process management.

"Of course, process management is very important for such a complex project," says Holger Schattke, head of the Digital Incoming Mail Service (DiPS) business unit at Deutsche Post. "We specifically chose MR.KNOW – BPM because of the flexibility and scalability of the platform. The current expansion at DiPS shows: We made the right choice, and the modular integration of the new services were not a problem for the system". The central process management platform MR.KNOW – BPM simply expands together with the product without any problems. All processes including rules, plausibilities and escalation scenarios can be flexibly defined and designed for each individual customer in this system. In order to be able to respond to individual customer requirements with particular ease, MR.KNOW – BPM gives users the option of creating and modifying these requirements themselves. Thanks to the use of graphical process modelling, no programming knowledge is required. Companies with a modern Business Process Management (BPM) suite find the Digital Incoming Mail Service particularly beneficial, since they can integrate it directly into their existing systems. This prevents media disruptions, and the processes within the company can be consistently improved. MR.KNOW – BPM provides a range of solutions, such as invoice processing, incoming mail processing, travel expense workflow, holiday and absence workflow, complaint management and HR management for processing the delivered documents and all other incoming channels in the companies.

"Of course, we are delighted to be able to support Deutsche Post in such a large and innovative project", says Andreas Mucke, Head of Business Development at Inspire Technologies GmbH. "The good cooperation in the past shows: MR.KNOW – BPM does not only flexibly adapt to customer requirements – our suite also provides the reliable stability, performance and expansion options which are needed for partners and customers".

Comprehensively evaluated
Following a comprehensive evaluation process, during which the central process control and the flexibility, performance and scalability of the solutions were put to the test, Deutsche Post decided on MR.KNOW – BPM. Additional tests were carried out in a SUN environment based on an Oracle database. A V890 server with four processors was used as the hardware basis. In this case, MR.KNOW – BPM achieved performance of 33,000 processes (330,000 transactions) per hour. This high performance and scalability ultimately made MR.KNOW – BPM the number one choice for Deutsche Post.

About Deutsche Post AG - Letter System Solutions
With its Letter System Solutions, Deutsche Post provides a full service for optimising and operating data and document-intensive processes in business communication. This also includes the "Incoming Mail Digitalization" service. A nationwide network of digitalizing stations allows businesses and organizations to scan their incoming mail. The documents are processed in close proximity to the company in decentralized locations, and made available in digital form on the same day. If required, documents can be classified, the content thereof can be indexed and they can be provided with a qualified electronic signature.

For more information, see:http://www.deutschepost.de/systemloesungen-brief


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