Enterprise businesses across the globe are struggling to manage their documents effectively. Companies with a high volume of business-critical documents deal with several challenges, from extracting the right information to digitizing the entire workflow. But the biggest concern right now is the pace at which the number of unstructured and semi-structured documents are mounting with every passing day besides the already existing ones.
Therefore, this further leads to ambiguities as reorganizing and efficiently handling the documents has become time-consuming and burdensome for the companies. So, companies are shifting towards electronic documents from paper documents, which resolves several problems, including retrieval, physical storage space, and access. Hence, organizations are moving towards advanced document workflow management systems to address these challenges.
What is a document workflow lifecycle?
Every business relies on documents, which go through multiple creation, production, and review stages for various tasks. Thus, in a document workflow lifecycle, companies capture, generate, track, edit, approve, store, retrieve, retain multiple documents, and destroy them if they become redundant. Hence, businesses are now leveraging advanced document solutions, cloud and on-premises, to speed up their daily operations and reduce the paperwork considerably.
An overview of document workflow management challenges
Unstructured data: The inability to manage documents and their unstructured data can jeopardize any business, leading to chaotic and unorganized digital file management and forfeiting business-critical information. According to the studies, approximately 90% of data organizations’ data is unstructured, most of which is locked in documents, emails, or images.
Complex documents: Enterprise documents are complex by nature and have complicated layouts, diverse templates, and various elements. In addition, tables, signatures, handwritten text, images, and logos make extracting the correct information arduous.
Incoherent document management: Every department has unique ways of maintaining its document and keeping a record of critical information. However, extracting the right information is both time and resource-consuming. Enterprise needs a powerful solution to accommodate domain-specific requirements and provide contextual information without wasting critical time.
The dearth of security: On top of that, document security is a big issue for CISOs and CIOs. As a result, most companies are leaning towards some quick solutions that compromise their document security as most of these solutions fail to safeguard the documents from sophisticated cyber-attacks.
In today’s time, where large businesses are thwarted by competition and rapid innovation, the traditional workflow mechanism has been proven ineffective. Therefore, enterprises require a well-revised method and a supreme tech solution to overcome all the challenges and provide a cushion to the product, sales, customer support, and marketing team to accelerate their operation and continue innovation.
Why do companies need a document workflow management solution?
- Get rid of all paperwork: Solutions for document workflow management are becoming more crucial as businesses switch from analog to digital systems. Because of the requirement for more automation and efficiency in the process, most firms are now interested in implementing document management systems.
- Reduce human error: A paperless office lowers the need for human intervention in document extraction, processing, and management. In addition, document workflow management is more precise, consistent, and effective with a tech-enabled solution.
- Speed and automation: Businesses have always struggled to cater to quick data extraction and editing needs. Human resources have fallen short in appeasing the ever-growing demand. With a tech-enabled solution, document workflow can successfully bridge the gaps by automating critical business processes and ensuring efficiency.
- Easy access to data: In the traditional document workflow system, it’s time-consuming to access any data. For example, retrieving past data from a conventional physical storage space is complicated. However, with robust technology, searching for specific data or a document takes a few seconds and retrieving it from the system. Storage of data: Without great storage, it’s impossible to maintain the speed and transparency of the life cycle. With the right technology, businesses can store their data digitally on one single platform to access their old files in practically no time.
Key features of document workflow management system
- 360-degree support in document extraction, processing, and comprehension: A robust document management system will first ingest and extract critical data from complex document layouts, text, and visual objects. By providing contextual information, it also enhances the data extracted from the document. The technology helps businesses to analyze and derive critical insights from the extracted data. Moreover, the in-built cognitive search facilities also help businesses to scan a specific document and find the correct information in seconds. Natural language and keyword-based search queries are available due to their cognitive search feature.
- Easy integration with enterprise applications: Document workflow management systems are flexible and can easily be integrated with other enterprise applications.
- Neat classification of document: A document workflow management system will automatically classify the document based on the categories, content, and visual layout.
- Make smart decisions quickly: Workflow management solutions offer a powerful dashboard with all the analytics for effective quality control and better business decisions.
Benefits of document workflow management
Digital or paper documents are precious for businesses, but without the right technology, they struggle to use them fully. Often, they discard them and miss the chance to leverage the critical data to change the course of business. A supportive document workflow management can help enterprises to take a better step and utilize the data to its full potential across departments. Here are a few benefits:
- Understand and predict customer behavior: The document workflow management system is powered by AI technology, which helps assess past data, find patterns, and predict the next move. In addition, the system can be integrated across departments (sales, marketing & customer support) to extract the data, analyze it and provide valuable information to help higher management make better business decisions and improve the buying experience.
- Foresee issues in real-time: AI integrated into workflow management can also help evaluate and identify possible issues and anomalies in real-time to make decisions to avoid fatal consequences.
- Improve productivity: Processing bulk documents daily is a massive roadblock for enterprises to focus on other vital areas. Moreover, it jeopardizes productivity and makes the entire system incompetent with mindless human error and unnecessary delays. With a better document workflow system, businesses can improve the cumbersome workflow, infuse speed in the whole process, and eliminate its time and cost-intensive aspects.
- Improve document security: Securing documents has become a non-negotiable factor for enterprises in recent times. This is why AI-powered document processing systems should be applied to provide an extra layer of security with extensive document scanning and quick reporting of any unusual activity.
Irrespective of the industry, managing complex documents and extracting the correct information has always been a massive challenge for enterprises. Document workflow management solutions are powered by AI, ML, and leading automation technology which helps businesses to extract the data faster and turn the chaotic workflow into an organized one.
Businesses have already started leveraging the powerful document workflow, and the future looks bright with the rapid advancement of technology, preparing modern enterprises for a holistic digital transformation.
Team EdgeVerve
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