CNG-Blog

Every business has some sort of document workflow process in use. Whether that document workflow consists of an invoice, order processing, email, snail mail, or any other document type; workflow of these documents occurs every single day in every single business. Once the realization occurs regarding how often document workflow occurs each day, one begins to consider ways to improve and streamline the document workflow process so as to maximize time and cost savings.

Putting together a visual diagram of the process allows each of the stakeholders to agree to the process and demonstrates how the workflow actually works. Often, people don’t know or understand the entire workflow, so a diagram provides multiple benefits and gives everyone involved a clearer picture of what is being done. It may also result in the elimination of steps added over the years which no longer contribute to the process as a whole.

After the decision is made to improve workflow, the question becomes ‘Where do I begin?’.  The best thing to do is to choose one document process to start with. After selecting the process to improve, begin by breaking the document process down into the actual physical steps. Take the business process and physically follow it from beginning to end. Spend time with each person involved along the way and find out what actions occur at each step, what the exceptions for each decision are and where the document goes once it leaves that step. The end result of this will be a clear understanding of what takes place for the entire process.

Mapping this to an electronic workflow product requires an understanding of the features needed in the product and how they apply to workflow management.  A good set of features is outlined in a table in this whitepaper. 

There is really no reason for businesses to continue using out-dated and inefficient workflow processing methods given today’s affordable and easy to use software technology. The trick is getting started and having a plan. The best way to get started is to pick a single workflow process and make this work with the software. After doing this use the new process for several weeks and learn how to improve it further before moving on the next workflow. After the first one is working correctly, subsequent processes will be easier to tackle.

    More and more of our customers are asking us to help them provide employees with remote access to documents. This requirement is driven by a number of factors. Many of our customers are growing and opening new offices. And others have home-based and remote office-based employees. They need for these workers at the remote offices to have access to customer documents. Medical offices with multiple offices need to be able to access patient charts from any branch office that the patient might walk into. A financial services advisor needs to be able to look up client documents remotely from the client’s office. Branch managers at various types of companies need to be able to route invoices electronically for approval to the home office accounting department, an accounting firm wants to allow their clients to access their tax documents via a secure portal.

    The common thread that runs through all of these remote document access applications is control. The medical office needs to control access to patient records due to HIPAA regulations, the financial advisor needs to meet SEC or FINRA compliance for all document storage,  the home office needs to control spending by implementing an AP approval process, the accounting firm needs to make sure a client only has access to their files.

    So putting documents on a shared drive and providing remote access to the server is not a viable solution to provide your workers with remote access to documents. This approach lacks control. Consider the example of the accounting firm. They want a customer to log in to a secure system preferably via the web so they can retrieve, view and print out documents. This requires a document management system with rights management to control each user’s access rights down to the document level and a web browser-based application made available to the CPA’s clients.

    Think of the benefits of this type of system. If you gave customers access to their documents via a web browser and your employees added documents via the document management application in the main office, the documents would be automatically available to the customer. No more phone calls, no more phone tag - no more looking up documents and faxing or emailing them. This approach makes both parties far more efficient - which is the name of the game in today’s economy.

    To help you navigate the key considerations for bringing remote document access to your business, Jon Clark has recently written a paper on remote access which is available here.

I recently received an email from a market research firm(http://www.researchandmarkets.com/). It has a number of interesting findings in the description of the report. 

- “Many organizations have little or no content management discipline. 82% of enterprises use network file servers as their primary content repository; 60% use e-mail folders; 14% have no formal content repository at all.”

- “Enterprises with ECM solutions are very happy with their effectiveness and cost-benefit - over 80% rate their ECM solution as being effective with at worst a neutral cost-benefit.”

- “Enterprises are implementing ECM primarily to improve access to information, collaboration, and productivity. By contrast, cost reduction and regulatory compliance rate last and second-last respectively as expected outcomes from ECM deployments”

This information supports the data I showed in my post earlier this month. You don’t actually save most of the time and money in creating and filing documents (although with the right solution it’s probable). Most of savings come from the improved access to information (in other words - retrieval of documents where and when needed)

Did you know that the average office document is copied 19 times in it’s lifetime. That’s a minimum of a $1/sheet of paper when it’s filed. Think of how much money would be saved by simply making it electronic and providing access to everyone in the organization.

When implemented correctly, Electronic Document Management is a huge budget saver. In these difficult economic times, companies need all the savings they can find.

    I consider electronic document management software (EDMS) one of the best investments a mid-sized firm can make. Obviously I’m biased as Cabinet NG sells EDMS and has a vested interest in promoting it. However, the other day I decided to do a high level analysis of the return on investment (ROI) using an EDMS for a mid-sized firm with 7 office staff managing documents. This resulted in a whitepaper which explains in detail how to do an ROI analysis for your firm.

The parameters for this analysis were:

Manual filing system

– Each person retrieved 10 documents per day at 3 minutes each.

– 20 documents were created and filed each day at 3 minutes each. 

– Labor cost was $15/hour.

– Keeping a paper system up to date costs $1400/month.

Electronic filing system using an EDMS

– Each person retrieved 10 documents per day at 30 seconds each.

– 20 documents were created and filed each day at 30 seconds each.

– Labor cost was $15/hour.

– Keeping an EDMS up to date costs $200/month.

Obviously there are other costs to consider for each system (these are outlined in the spreadsheet in the whitepaper), but the analysis represented in the paper shows a solid return on investment of slightly less than 8 months. This represents a return of investment of 150% in just the first year.  Spreading this over 3 years results in a return of 380%.  Keep in mind these results do not include some intangibles like cutting down on the number of lost and misfiled documents.

The numbers speak for themselves. I encourage you to download the whitepaper, fill in your own numbers and generate your own ROI. In these challenging economic times, it is a necessity to be as efficient as possible. If you have specific feedback I’d enjoy hearing from you.