An interesting article in AIIM E-DOC pointed towards a"case study" that a County Treasurer had done. This particular Treasurer, always attempting to administer items as efficiently and effectively as possible, implemented a new way of processing payments made by members of the community for their property taxes. Rather than having them come and pay them in person at the county office building, a new plan was made that allowed the payments to be made at banks.

"These functions generate an astronomical number of records, bills, payments, correspondence, and other documents." Due to this, a document automation (aka document assembly) system was purchased to handle this increase. As the article leads to, the complete procedure that previously took up to 6 weeks to process now takes less than 24 hours. This dramatic optimization likely paid the software system back a short time after it was even purchased.

As the article stated, when taxpayers were late on their payment, it normally "required several staff hours over a two-day period. Now staff members recall any of over 75,000 envelope images in moments." Due to the use of the document assembly (Mail Merge) software, not only was time saved, but also money due to it no longer being necessary to pay staff these long hours that it would normally have taken to do this job.

Document assembly (Mail Merge) software does some pretty amazing things for various companies. It is quite routine to hear about lawyers employing this type of systems to minimize the time focused on creating applicable forms for their line of work. It is even commonplace for real estate agents or banks to utilize document generation. Businesses, because of the magnitude of the deals they perform are finally joining the rest of the groups in this technological venture.

It is rarer to hear about County offices implementing the technological expertise that companys creating this type of document assembly (Mail Merge) software have made available to whoever chooses to grab hold of it. This article demonstrates how the software is quite applicable in many settings, and it would be wise for more public offices such as this one to make use of the technology available to them to make not only their job easier, but also more accurate and efficient.