The crippling postal strike has resulted in a delay of 8.9 million items in sorting centres throughout South Africa. CWU (Communications Workers Union) reports that despite extra workers sorting through the resulting backlog, delays will be far longer than a week, as the Post Office has suggested.
Businesses nationwide are feeling the repercussions of the delay in mail delivery. Doctors, for example, can expect to receive R50-million a day less income because medical aids have not received a majority of claims through the post.
Medscheme Group Services managing director Gary Taylor maintains, "our experience tells us the Post Office will take some time to catch up on the backlog. By then the doctor will send us another account, and these duplicates result in 30 percent of all paper claims we receive. That's one million extra pieces of paper in the system."
The serious backlog and interruption in delivery has resulted in companies rapidly reassessing their online strategies. The move towards a predominantly paperless society has never seemed more appealing. Many companies are integrating e-mail in their day-to-day operations to avoid costly delays and delivery that is not guaranteed. E-mail is also decidedly more cost-effective than posting, faxing and phoning.
"Traditional means of communication have become outdated, " says Mike Wright, CEO of The E-mail Corporation in Johannesburg. "Not only is our postal system tediously slow, but you also run the risk of other's opening your mail. We live in a society that demands instant gratification - information needs to be delivered both timeously and securely."
Financial institutions, in particular, are now looking at secure e-mail delivery applications to raise the levels of customer service. The aim is to send confidential and highly sensitive information such as bank statements, invoices and payslips, in a format that only the desired recipient is able to read and open.
The ultimate form of secure e-mail is the implementation of a full Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). This uses digital certificates in conjunction with Public/Private keys. Unfortunately the uptake of this technology has not been as fast as initially expected due to the technical complexities involved. This has increasingly become an issue for companies who wish to send regular e-mails containing confidential information.
"The way to achieve confidentiality without an expensive PKI infrastructure is to send an encrypted attachment rather than an encrypted e-mail," says Wright. "This enables the secure mailing of documentation in a format that ensures that only the intended addressee is able to open it. With no requirement for costly key or certificate management, this methodology service makes secure messaging easy to deploy, administer and use."
Though there is still a lot of education to be done in the market, many companies are beginning to wake up to the fact that online business is the way of the future. A good e-mail strategy is vital to the success of businesses in today's economy where competitors are only a mouse-click away.
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