The process of shipping and receiving items might seem simple, but it actually encompasses many intertwined and dependent logistical processes that can cause chaos if not handled correctly. The inbound and outbound logistics processes (aka shipping and receiving), touch every aspect of your business, including operations, finance, marketing, customer service, and IT. This makes it critical for business leaders to effectively manage every minute detail related to these functions.

If inventory is not accurately accounted for during the inbound/receiving process, it becomes nearly impossible to maintain an accurate system moving forward which affects all other aspects of logistics services and the supply chain. For instance, an incorrect appreciation of your inventory can lead to incomplete shipments, late arrivals, and more in the shipping and receiving process. These avoidable errors can cost a lot to the company, but a simple investment in business automation and innovation can help lead the way to improve your business’ logistics management.

5 Tips to Improve Shipping and Receiving Process Workflow

When it comes to optimizing your shipping and receiving process workflow, there are multiple steps that businesses can take that lead to considerable improvements. Here are some “quick wins” that don’t require a massive investment, but can make a significant difference shortly after implementation.

#1 - Improve Your Inventory Handling Ability

Accurately managing inventory is one of the most critical aspects of the order fulfillment process. In order to ensure you’re able to properly track and maintain your inventory levels, there are a few subprocesses you need to optimize:

Demand Forecasting - Forecasting customer demand for each sales channel should be a central component of how you determine baseline inventory needs. Maintaining standard internal communication and demand tracking systems helps keep you informed of key indicators of your customer behavior and prepared for needs at any given time.

Manufacturing Capacity Tracking - As any Econ student can tell you, the flip side of demand is supply. By conducting accurate demand forecasting with manufacturing capacity, you can develop an expected timeline of how much inventory you’ll need to warehouse and ship over the coming weeks, months, and business quarters.

Stock Level Accuracy - It is important to keep checking and updating your stock levels. Apart from regular orders, scenarios like returns and damages also need to be considered and maintained. Having the capacity to handle unexpected surges in demand can go a long way to maintaining high customer satisfaction.

#2 - Maintain Inventory Visibility

Transparency of stock levels is essential when you’re selling across multiple channels and managing various locations. Inventory visibility keeps you updated on the happenings of all sales channels so that you can be proactive and replenish stocks to meet upcoming demands and continue uninterrupted services.

Utilizing a smart inventory management application can easily improve inventory visibility across locations and get real-time data on your inventory thus improving the shipping and receiving process workflow.

#3 - Invest in Warehouse Management

As your business grows, so does the demand, space needed, and requirement of better warehouse management. Multi-location inventory management can be a daunting task. If you manage and maintain multiple warehouses, you’ll need a system capable of delivering and analyzing warehouse-specific details. In addition, if warehouse management is not up to the mark, the order fulfillment process and your e-commerce will also face avoidable challenges.

#4 - Track Order Entry, Notification, and Status

When the inbound process is handled correctly, it allows for a more straightforward outbound process. Knowing and providing the status of orders in real-time will help your delivery network keep track of progress, identify bottlenecks, and improve customer experience.

Maintaining a keen eye on what’s happening with your orders is the first step toward perfecting your order processing system. Track and internally share the status of each order so that no delays exist in getting the products moved on to the next level. Entering orders is similar to the pre-receipt process in the inbound process. The first steps of an outbound system are to validate orders, check for any errors, and manage exceptions if any arise.

#5 - Automate Processes

In today’s computer-driven environment, optimization and automation often go hand in hand. Robotic process automation (RPA) is an excellent option for streamlining nearly any business function, including shipping and receiving. Despite the name, this is not to suggest that you employ physical robots in the handling of shipments. Instead, this versatile solution uses digital “bots” to handle any repetitive, rules-based tasks more quickly and accurately than their human counterparts. This can be a great way to create an intelligent workplace by speed up order and payment processing, determine least-cost routing, and even make inventory management more efficient.

Investing in business process automation tools can sound daunting, but it doesn't have to be a drastic step. It helps to take it piece by piece. For example, your business can start with paper digitization tools that allow you to enter inventory into the system more efficiently or by investing in intelligent lockers that can make parcel receiving and shipping logistics more flexible and convenient.

Introducing business automation strategically can take your logistics process to a whole new level. Exela’s shipping logistics services combine a team of shipping and receiving specialists with a convenient, web-based portal for flexible shipping solutions. We oversee all aspects of your shipping and receiving process workflow using advanced technology that improves efficiency, transparency, and employee experience.

Get in touch with us to better understand how Exela’s Smart Office Solutions can improve your existing processes.

It’s no secret that 2020 brought unprecedented challenges to the healthcare industry. While health systems and networks stretched themselves to respond to the global pandemic, non-emergency care and elective procedures were postponed or cancelled, leading to a large drop in revenue, despite the increased demand for healthcare.

Digital technology has been playing a significant role in helping businesses across industries adapt to the new normal. However, a 2019 survey of physicians and consumers found that just 32% of doctors and 27% of patients rated their healthcare system as performing well in terms of introducing new digital technologies. Digital transformation in healthcare has remained a slow process.

Why does an industry so closely related to science and technology lag in adopting new digital solutions? There are many reasons, including a relative lack of financial incentives compared to other industries, but the most important is the risk faced by healthcare providers.

For most industries, confusion or errors caused by unfamiliar technology may result in minor setbacks or inconveniences that can be straightened out relatively easily. However, in healthcare, mistakes can literally be the difference between life and death. This means healthcare providers are especially reluctant to take a chance on a new, potentially disruptive solution when current workflows are getting the job done.

How COVID-19 is Changing Healthcare

As medical care systems work to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s new urgency around finding and adopting solutions, specifically healthcare automation,that can increase efficiency and accuracy while reducing costs. The value of greater efficiency, in particular, is set to outlast the virus, since healthcare providers are likely to face an influx of patients who have been postponing regular check-ups and office visits for less serious or elective treatments until the greatest dangers of the pandemic have passed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has also caused a shift in a previously well-entrenched public preference for face-to-face medical care. Before shelter-in-place orders and social distancing guidelines had a large portion of the population avoiding direct human interaction wherever possible, there was always broad consensus that in-person healthcare was more reliable and more accurate. COVID-19 has created a new demand for virtual healthcare options that is already leading to new improvements and innovations.

Digital solutions will play a critical role as the healthcare industry rebounds from the toll inflicted by COVID-19. Patient-facing solutions will allow providers to adapt to the new normal in which all interaction is done more cautiously, while less visible digital solutions will help them recover and move forward by capitalizing on new efficiencies and time-saving technologies. Here are some worth considering:

6 Digital Solutions to Help Healthcare Bounce Back

1. Digital Check-Ins

Patient check-in is an important part of any medical appointment, as it not only serves as the first point of contact for customers, but it provides an opportunity to collect critical information about the patient and their medical history. The problem here is that many healthcare facilities still rely on manual, paper-based processes that can be slow, error-prone, and difficult to adapt to new social distancing guidelines. Digitizing this process streamlines it, allowing for patient data to be inputted directly into the system, thereby decreasing the error rate and helping keep visitors and staff members safe. It can even be incorporated into the online scheduling system, so patients can take care of it before arriving, which reduces time in-office.

2. Digital Medical Records Management

A comprehensive and user-friendly digital medical records management system can have far-reaching impacts that vastly improve efficiency in key areas. One study found that utilizing electronic records could reduce diagnostic testing duplication and lower costs by 7 to 11 percent. Digitizing records increases legibility, reduces the chance of duplicating records, and allows physicians to access onsite records essentially instantly. And having 24/7 access enables physicians to make informed decisions more quickly.

3. Patient Financial Services

Healthcare organizations were already operating with tight financial margins before the global pandemic put additional, unprecedented strain on their operations. Paperless billing, electronic bill presentment, and other methods of digitizing patient financial services have been proven to increase collections on accounts payable, which will be crucial to helping healthcare providers rebound financially post-pandemic. Digitizing this end of operations also makes it easier for patients to discover payment options that best fit their situation, not only providing a better experience for the patient, but also increasing the chances of the provider successfully collecting payment.

4. Automated Claims Processing & Claim Adjudication

Health insurance claim processing and claim adjudication represent a major administrative cost and bottleneck for healthcare providers, and a major opportunity for efficiency improvements. Intelligent healthcare automation software help to pre-validate claims before submission to ensure they are accurate, complete, and compliant with all relevant regulations. Claims can be submitted faster and with higher accuracy, which helps providers get paid fast and accelerate the entire revenue cycle. These digital tools also simplify communication between providers and insurance companies, making it easier to coordinate around a particular claim, align on any discrepancies, and simplify adjudication.

5. Liquidity management

The COVID-19 crisis has made one thing abundantly clear: efficient allocation of funds and resources is critical for healthcare providers to rebound. Big players in the healthcare industry tend to have large budgets and face long cycle times, slim margins, and complex decision-making processes. Utilizing advanced digital technology to analyze liquidity trends, factor invoices, and better manage financial resource allocation can go a long way toward ensuring financial stability and optimization.

Two Keys to Successful Digital Transformation in Healthcare

Think Ahead

Certain digital solutions generate the most value when they are deployed together, so plan ahead. Implementing multiple digital technologies can be a years-long process, so it’s important to make a long-term implementation plan. Prioritize capitalizing on high-impact upgrades and solutions that enable more downstream improvements. For example, digitizing medical records makes it easier to transition to electronic claims submission tools and digital payment portals, adding even more efficiencies and greater compliance assurances. The total effect of the synergies shared between these systems is greater than the sum of its parts.

Get Leadership on Board Early

Successfully transitioning to a new system is as much a cultural shift as a technological one, particularly in fields that may be resistant to that kind of change. This will largely depend on support from senior leadership, so getting key players on board early is critical. It can be helpful to conduct some internal research to identify common pain points and inefficiencies that can be solved with digital tools. Be prepared to speak to the benefits of a given digital solution, and tailor your message to different leaders’ most salient pain points. Short-term thinking may cause friction, but this can be overcome with a strong focus on the long-term benefits.

Even amidst a global economic crisis that is having a devastating impact on nearly every industry and region, the healthcare industry is in a uniquely challenging situation. But, with the right digital solutions, healthcare can adapt to survive in the new, post-coronavirus normal.

Digital transformation has gone from a potential “nice-to-have” to an absolute competitive necessity in many industries. In order to transition critical processes to digital formats, many businesses are starting by digitizing their documents.

Developing or investing in an effective document digitization process is a great entry point for a business’s broader digital transformation, as it provides an easy way to ingest new data and information into downstream digitized functions you can build up as you go.

What to Look for in a Document Digitization Platform

One of the key things you’ll want to look for in a document digitization platform will be image quality. When you hear the phrase “image quality,” you almost certainly think of the image resolution. Generally, this is presented in a metric like pixels per inch (ppi) or pixels per mm.

This generally tells you how sharp and clear the resulting image will be, the size of the original document, as well as the amount of digital space the document will take up. Because higher resolution images tend to be larger files, when dealing with a large quantity of scanned documents, you may reach a point of diminishing returns, where the extra storage space requirements outweigh the benefits of increasing the image definition.

However, image resolution isn’t the only important factor in determining the quality of a digitized image. Others include:

Skew - Improper alignment of a document as it’s being digitized can make the output document difficult to read and may even cut off critical information located near the margins of the page. It may not seem critically important to make sure documents are lined up straight, but fixing skew digitally after the fact may require pixel interpolation, which can be inaccurate and increase the size of the digital file.

Fold - Depending on the type of scanner in use, some documents may get folded or wrinkled during scanning, making it difficult or even impossible to read large sections of the digitized document.

White balance - For most businesses, the vast majority of the documents in need of digitization will be in black and white. But even documents that only exist in greyscale, white balance needs to be taken into account to avoid unexpected tinting or overexposure. Not to mention the importance of being able to properly distinguish between different colors on charts and graphs within full-color documents.

Illumination uniformity - If you’ve ever run a standard office scanner with the top open, you’re aware of the bright light that moves across the surface as the machine runs. Proper illumination on scanned documents is vital to legibility and data capture, as well as image and color fidelity.

Field artifacts and noise - In a perfect world, the scanning process would only ever capture exactly what’s on the original page. However, in the real world, dust, dirt, scratches, and other errant particles, often referred to as “noise,” will inevitably be picked up and reproduced in digital files. While this typically isn’t a major concern, an artifact can sometimes block or obscure critical information. It’s important to monitor.

Geometric distortion - Warping is a common issue, especially when a scanned image needs to be scaled up. Typical camera lenses are poorly corrected for this, though scanners are usually much more capable of avoiding distortions. Additionally, digital tools designed to correct distortions created by lenses have become widely available and easy to use - some can even automate the process.

The importance of detecting and correcting these various error types is determined in large part by the type of document and the reason it’s being digitized. For example, when digitally recreating historical documents, which may include or even be historically significant images in and of themselves, maintaining extreme fidelity might be of high importance. For most business documents, however, legibility - both to humans and to AI-run data extraction tools - is usually the most important determining factor.

Real-Time Image Quality Assurance (IQA)

Advanced scanning platforms have gotten really good at limiting the frequency of all types of scanning errors and distortions, but the best platforms don’t rely on prevention alone. There’s nothing worse than finishing a large job only to realize you need to start again from the beginning because of a minor error that threw off the entire batch.

Exela’s Document Digitization solution uses advanced scanning technology that performs in-line monitoring by testing every image for all sorts of potential issues while the job is underway. Problems and defects can be detected earlier in the process, allowing for timely intervention and resolution rather than costly and time-consuming overruns and re-scans.

The year 2020 saw significant change and upheaval, particularly in the healthcare sector. The COVID-19 pandemic, along with the economic disruptions it caused, have dramatically changed the face of the healthcare industry. In the latest edition of PluggedIN: Taking the Pulse of Healthcare in 2021, we look at some of the biggest points of concern in the healthcare space, as well as emerging trends that may help the industry recover.

• The Cost of Healthcare
• Access to Care
• Virtual Healthcare as an Alternative
• The Impact of AI on Healthcare
• How Big Data is Changing the Healthcare Industry
• Exela’s Part in Shaping the Future of Healthcare

Get PluggedIN Now.

Efficient and effective management of documents and records helps any organization run more smoothly. While improving this function can make a big difference in nearly any industry, it can have a particularly positive impact when it comes to organizing court records. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily shut down courtrooms, the United States’ federal court system was facing a backlog of cases, as were many state and local jurisdictions across the country.

Keeping court proceedings running quickly and smoothly while maintaining the integrity of the process and avoiding errors is critical to the pursuit of justice and a well-functioning society overall. Digitizing court documents - both historical or archived documents as well as all newly created documents moving forward - is a critical step in helping push through this blockage.

Court documents are instruments or records that are presented to or produced by a court, and they play a pivotal role in many of the basic functions of the justice system. There are a wide variety of court documents, including some that are available to the public and some that are considered highly confidential. This distinction impacts how they should be handled and stored - a distinction that can be more easily enforced on digital documents than on traditional paper.

Digitizing Documents

Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, digitization quickly climbed the priorities list at many organizations. With in-person interactions limited in an effort to slow the spread of the virus, taking processes into the digital realm became key to maintaining continuity, while improving existing systems and optimizing work efficiency. Digitizing documents stands out as a critical opportunity for improvement, as it would result in a faster, smoother, and more organized document management system and empower other downstream digitization efforts.

This kind of digitization can help operations function more efficiently. For businesses, this translates to improved productivity and greater profits. For the courts, more effective use of time and resources means cases go ahead as scheduled without needless delays, business is handled during the first hearing, communication between all parties is clear, and trials can take less time.

Digitizing court records may sound like a daunting task, but the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks, especially in the long run. Some of the most compelling reasons courts need to start implementing digitization into their records management protocols include:

Improved Accessibility

No matter how organized your physical document storage and retrieval processes are, accessing digitized documents through a well-designed management system is going to be easier and more efficient. You can store records, define a standardized naming format, find files and distribute them within a few minutes.

Access isn’t only important for citizens and the court itself. Digitizing court documents can also make it easier and faster for other platforms, organizations, and government agencies to utilize important information and metadata included in those documents. For example, more accessible records would make it easier for local police departments to create a simple portal function helping individuals look up outstanding warrants, tickets, and fines without leaving their website.

Reduced Storage Space

One of the most immediately visible impacts of digitizing records is the reduction in necessary storage space. One piece of paper may seem thin, but at the rate new documents are created, they can pile up quickly. No doubt, when you picture a court records room, you probably envision a vast basement room filled with rows upon rows of boxes or filing cabinets. That’s a lot of square footage that could be put to more productive use. Tracking down documents in that environment can be difficult and time-consuming. Digitizing records will help you save on storage space. Maintaining physical records requires full-time help. Someone needs to be there to get the files and move them from locations.

Improved Security

Improving the accessibility of records doesn’t mean sacrificing security. Legal and court documents often contain some amount of sensitive or personally identifiable information, and it’s the court’s job to ensure the security of this information isn’t compromised. When dealing with confidential data, it is critical to ensure that the documents don't reach anyone other than the authorized persons.

Paper documents can be difficult to protect with high levels of certainty. Despite best efforts, hard copies of documents can be mislabeled, incorrectly filed, or otherwise lost to misplaced. They can also be victims of accidents like fires or floods. Digital documents, on the other hand, are much more secure, and not just from being damaged or lost. Not only can digitized documents be defined with permissions structures that ensure they are only accessible by approved individuals, and also offer audit tracking, allowing the clerks or records custodian to track who’s viewed, accessed, or changed a given document, when, and from where.

Physical paper documents are a staple of pretty much every industry, none more so than the justice system. It may be difficult to imagine replacing something so deeply ingrained in the standard operating procedures, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Exela's Document Digitization solution offers a great starting point for transforming paper documents into fully digital assets quickly and accurately.

Find out more about how Exela’s digitization solutions can help bring the justice system into the digital age.

Digital shopping is here to stay. E-commerce was on the rise prior to the massive disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. One recent study found that online purchases have increased by 6 to 10 percentage points during the pandemic across most product categories.

While this has certainly been a boon to shipping and delivery companies, as well as retailers who were able to quickly and successfully adapt to the new market conditions, it also raises some new challenges - particularly in terms of last mile delivery.

What is Last Mile Delivery and How Do Smart Lockers Help?

Last mile delivery represents the final leg of the delivery process. Generally speaking, that means the trip the package makes from the distribution center to the recipient’s hands. This portion of the journey has the greatest impact on customer satisfaction and is widely considered to be the most important step in the supply chain. The majority of the costs associated with delivery services - up to 53% of the total cost of the delivery - reside in the last mile of the process. This is where smart lockers can make a big difference.

Smart locker systems like Exela’s Intelligent Lockers offer a convenient solution to last mile delivery that benefits both suppliers and end consumers. Here are 4 key ways smart lockers can improve the last mile delivery landscape.

Simplifying Routes

One of the clearest examples of how a smart locker system can impact the standard delivery process is by immediately reducing the number of necessary stops for delivery drivers. Delivering to individual addresses is far from the most efficient shipping option, and often means sending out partially-full trucks, which results in a greater number of delivery vehicles on the roads than necessary, driving up costs. If a delivery person can drop off 20 packages at one location rather than making 20 individual stops, that means shorter routes, less time spent per delivery, and reduced costs. The last mile of those deliveries becomes considerably more efficient.

Reducing Failed Deliveries

While most people have their orders delivered to their homes or offices in hopes of facilitating a smooth handoff, many are at work or otherwise out during normal delivery hours, and may not work in a standard office where they can have things sent to them through the company mail room. Between these common situations, simple miscommunications, and occasional thieves stealing packages that don’t belong to them, failed deliveries can be a big problem in last mile delivery.

In fact, one recent study found that 65% of retailers said that failed or late deliveries are a significant cost to their business. This is because many of the most common ways businesses deal with failed deliveries can be very expensive, especially when a high volume of deliveries doesn’t reach their recipients. Whether refunding the delivery charges to the customer, canceling the order and refunding the entire purchase, offering discounts on future orders, or attempting redelivery at a later time or date, the business loses money. And considering 1 in every 20 online orders is not successfully delivered on the first attempt, those costs can really add up.

Smart locker solutions like Exela’s Intelligent Lockers can go a long way towards eliminating the risk of packages being undeliverable and the need for costly additional attempts.

Making BOPIS Easier

Buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) has become an increasingly popular option for digital shoppers who don’t want to wait several days for shipping, but also don’t want to go out to the brick and mortar location only to find out an item is out of stock. Solutions like Intelligent Lockers essentially put the delivery aspect in the hands of the purchaser. They select their items and check out electronically from the comfort of their home. An onsite employee can then retrieve those items and secure them in a smart locker. At this point, the customer is alerted that their order is ready for pickup, along with the locker number and the code, PIN number, or link to unlock their particular locker when they arrive.

Improving Security and Sanitation

Perhaps the biggest way the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted last mile delivery is the greater interest in contactless and touchless delivery options. Many people want to avoid face-to-face drop-offs and pickups in order to help prevent the virus from spreading. Smart lockers are an excellent solution to ensure packages reach the right people without an actual physical handoff.

While the CDC says that the risk of spreading Covid-19 on the surface of a package appears to be low, they do still caution that the virus can survive on the surface for some time. Many people are opting to be extra cautious, and delivering one package per locker helps cut down on the potential interaction between non-recipients and packages. This also allows the delivery person to drop off packages without risking them being stolen or damaged.

Mobile apps that interface with the lockers reduce the number of touch-points that may need to be sanitized between uses. BOPIS applications of smart lockers can also enable social distancing efforts by reducing the need for physical lines with staggered pickup notifications.

Smart Lockers Keep Businesses Moving Forward

The impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic will be felt for many years, and in order to maintain growth and competitiveness, businesses need to adapt to the new normal. The growth in online shopping paired with the general aversion to in-person interactions has complicated last mile delivery, but innovative solutions like Intelligent Lockers can help companies surmount these new obstacles and deliver value to their customers.

Check out how Exela’s Intelligent Lockers can be applied to your business.

Cutting costs and speeding up payments is a powerful motivator for any organization, but it is especially important for healthcare organizations. The payments landscape in the healthcare industry is uniquely complicated, and constantly changing.

Much of the complexity that plagues the healthcare payment industry stems from the wide variety of payment types and sources healthcare organizations have to deal with - from cash, check, and credit card payments from patients to more complicated receivables like explanations of benefits (EOBs), electronic remittance advice (ERAs), and ACH payments. Healthcare providers also need to manage claims and handle exceptions, resulting in a potentially slow and inefficient AR process.

On top of that, a recent study found that 87 percent of healthcare providers rely on paper and manual processes to handle their collections, leading to workflow bottlenecks and higher rates of human error.

How Medical Lockbox Simplifies Payments

Many hospitals, healthcare networks, and physician’s offices attempt to develop in-house solutions to manage their complex payment processing operations. The problem is that self-built systems like these tend to be slow and demand resources that could be better spent in other areas, like customer service or patient care.

Solutions like Exela’s Medical Lockbox are designed to replace these costly and cumbersome in-house systems and break through the complicated morass of healthcare payments infrastructure. Through digitization and automation, Exela’s Medical Lockbox centralizes all incoming receivables for healthcare providers, speeding up the payments process, increasing accuracy to avoid errors, bad debt, and write-offs, and shortening the revenue cycle, giving providers faster access to cash for greater liquidity.

Through the use of automated business rules processing, Exela’s Medical Lockbox can deliver same-day deposit and reconciliation for everything from ERAs, ACH, and checks to credit card payments, and complex explanation of benefits (EOB) statements. Plus, Medical Lockbox’s EOB to ERA conversion capability eliminates manual cash posting, making it easier for funds to auto post directly in the provider’s patient accounting system, and reduces the hassles of cash reconciliation.

Exela’s omni-channel intake of both digital and paper formats creates a complete and centralized processing system. All payments, regardless of their source, are converted into 835 electronic remittance files through automated processes that provide greater accuracy and speed than manual systems. These digital files can then be posted directly to medical billing systems, further improving turnaround time.

Paper-based payments and related documents are digitized using Exela’s in-house scanning platform. Utilizing cutting-edge intelligent character recognition (ICR) technology to extract and enrich data and provide benefits beyond what optical character recognition (OCR) tools can provide, the Exela platform transforms paper documents into fully digital assets, and is capable of handling non-standard claims and unexpected variations within claims without triggering exceptions.

Healthcare Automation Streamlines Operations

Exela has been providing lockbox services for a wide range of industries for over 30 years, we’ve used the experience to create a solution specifically designed to address the unique payment processing needs of healthcare providers. In order to offer the most comprehensive, efficient, and cost-effective lockbox solution possible for healthcare providers, we offer a number of specialized add-ons, including:

• - Revenue Integrity Services
• - Medical Coding
• - Audit & Consultation Services
• - Denial Management & Analytics
• - Medical Record Management Services

Medical Lockbox can even provide a simpler and more streamlined workflow for addressing claims denials. Our web-based denials management tool displays the original claim and related remittance information in a single view, making it easier to determine quickly and confidently whether a claim should be adjusted, if the patient should be billed, or if the denial should be appealed. Plus, by automating processing of EOB templates, Medical Lockbox reduces the denial rate and enables clear tracking and faster denial resolutions of denials.

Find out more about how Medical Lockbox can save your organization time, reduce costs, and streamline your critical AR processes.

As the COVID-19 pandemic maintains its grip on many parts of the world, normal patterns of life have become radically altered. A few months ago, most of us wouldn’t have given a trip to the grocery store or dining out with friends a second thought. Now, the simple act of going out to run a few errands has become an ordeal. That’s why many people around the world have decided it’s easier just to shop online.

Online retail had already been on the rise for years prior to the pandemic. In 2019, e-commerce market share rose to 16%, up from 14.4% in 2018 and 13.2% in 2017.¹ Now, with governments urging citizens to limit their movement and observe social distancing recommendations, it comes as no surprise that the growth of e-commerce has greatly accelerated.

Trends in Online Spending and Contactless Delivery

Online spending in the US in March and early April was up 30% from the previous year - a significant increase over the 20% year over year growth seen in recent years.² Clearly, online shopping has been a workable alternative for consumers hoping to avoid risking a trip to potentially crowded shopping centers, but many shoppers are looking for even more security. Hence, the growing phenomenon of contactless and touchless delivery options. This trend has been most popular with fast food and other delivery dining options, but it’s being adopted across a wide array of products, from prescription drugs to new cars.

A McKinsey study³ found a 20% increase in consumer preference for contactless delivery, and companies are finding creative ways to comply - whether by having the delivery person leave the package at an agreed upon location and send a photo of it once it’s delivered or deploying fleets of delivery robots.⁴

Buy online, pickup in store (BOPIS) is also an attractive option for consumers to limit their contact with other shoppers and staff. Rather than browsing through the aisles in person, they can find the products they’re looking for on the store’s website and complete their purchase digitally, limiting the potential contact to when they arrive at the store to pick up their items. Some businesses are reducing even this small amount of contact using electronic lockers, where customers can pick up their orders without directly interacting with anyone.

Contactless Delivery with Intelligent Lockers

Delivery services aren’t the only side of the transaction innovating to maintain social distancing and keep drivers and shoppers safe. Businesses, apartment complexes, and college campuses can also utilize products like Exela’s Intelligent Lockers to proactively eliminate human contact during deliveries.

Plus, in a world where nobody wants to get close enough to a delivery person to sign for a package, Intelligent Lockers provide a higher level of security than other contactless delivery methods can attain. Rather than leaving packages out in the open or trying to agree on some sort of covert drop point, delivery drivers can instead place them in a locker, safe from not only would-be “porch pirates,” but also from wind, rain, and the sun.

By integrating with messaging platforms like SMS and email to deliver instant notifications directly to the consumer as soon as their order is ready for pickup, and to the seller as soon as items have been retrieved, Exela’s Intelligent Lockers ensure successful deliveries.

Lockers also make package delivery more convenient for the recipients, since there’s no rush to collect a delivered package. Exela’s Intelligent Lockers can be accessed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week using a smartphone and QR code, an employee or student badge with an RFID chip, or using a console built into the locker bank. 

Conclusion

Even after the pandemic ends, changes in consumer behavior are likely to stick around. In a post-COVID world, the demand for a convenient and secure contactless pickup and delivery option isn’t likely to fade anytime soon. 

To learn more about how Exela’s Intelligent Lockers can provide a better experience for students and faculty on college campuses, check out what Exela did for George Washington University.

1. https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/us-ecommerce-sales/

2. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/19/coronavirus-what-americans-are-buying-online-while-in-quarantine.html

3. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/adapting-customer-experience-in-the-time-of-coronavirus

4. https://www.businessinsider.com/delivery-startup-using-robots-in-colombia-to-avoid-coronavirus-2020-4-customers-stuck-at-home-because-of-the-coronavirus-can-order-and-pay-for-meals-digitally-and-then-last-mile-delivery-is-completed-by-the-robots-6

Automation and efficiency are nothing new to most businesses. However, the speed at which technology is advancing, especially in these critical areas, can make it difficult to keep up.

Exela’s latest edition of PluggedIN: “Intelligent Automation is the Next Step in Digital Transformation,” covers the emergence of powerful new tools like conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing, the increasing adoption of automation technology among small and medium sized businesses, as well as the growing marketplace for process efficiency solutions and Exela’s unique place in it.

The full issue of PluggedIN is available for download now at:

https://www.exelatech.com/pluggedin