Partner Article

2017 – Being Smarter With What You Have

Invu explains that there is only one way for your documents to go…digital

Stories abounded in the early millennium of companies going paperless, looking to use scanning to transform the ease and speed of document access and reduce printing costs. Although increased use of email has helped and people are more adept at sending, receiving and using scanned documents, there remains a culture of printing and physical storage or local document saving onto hard drives in many industries. As a result, important information can be buried in individual email accounts or on staff desks.

Recently a company (named withheld) disclosed that for three years it had been purchasing an item for £20 per unit, despite a contract stating the cost as £15 per unit. This vital document lay forgotten and disregarded in an email account. Over 500,000 units were purchased before the company realised its error, resulting in an overspend of more than £2.5 million. For many small and medium-sized businesses this error could have been fatal. An email properly captured and shared would have prevented the huge financial loss.

In 2017, savvy businesses will look more at how to take the whole business forward and reap the benefits of the sophistication of ‘true digitalisation of documents’. This will deliver cost and time savings, while reducing the frustration of not being able to quickly find necessary information.

1/ An increase in ‘end to end’ processes – what historically have been back office transactions will soon become part of the whole business strategy, ensuring that everything a business does is customer-centric and focused. As a new generation of ‘digital native’ workers and managers progress through companies, they will also demand a fundamental and sensible change towards simpler and more sophisticated processes.

2/ Opinion will be driven (and underpinned) by data – with better, quicker access to relevant information, business leaders will be increasingly able, and determined, to base their decisions on up-to-date and accurate data, rather than common sense or gut feel.

3/ The ‘keep everything’ culture will move to a ‘keep only what I need’ mentality – computer space will be freed up as people begin to see the benefits of central rather than local document storage, as well as improved workflow. Anyone handling data needs to understand its sensitive nature and recognise what is subject to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and info-security rules and best practice.

4/ From desktop to cloud – cloud technology is no longer just ‘nice to have’, it is becoming the norm for IT departments of all businesses. Mid-size companies are moving towards Infrastructure-as-a-Service technology and, over the coming 12 months, more are likely to move applications including CRM to the cloud, using Applications-as-a-Service models.

5/ Static scanner to mobile machine – the use of the office scanner is set to tumble as mobile devices are increasingly used as the key source of information input and initiation. They already sit in every employee’s pocket, able to do the same job as a scanner. Mobile device capture is undoubtedly on the up.

6/ Document indexing to machine learning – when technology becomes more developed so our human input is reduced, particularly at an administrative level. Hours can be spent currently organising data as a labour of love but the rise of ‘self-organising documents’ will see a move to analytics-based extraction. This will save hours of manual labour as the technology reads the document, extracts key phrases and creates a standardised document such as an invoice, which is relevant to the business.

7/ From spreadsheet process to system control – individual spreadsheets and documents are the main protagonists in the crime against reliable processes and one of the bugbears of any IT department. Single user, obscure and personal templating makes it hard for another party to understand the data within the document and leaves no clear control or audit trail. Users are moving away from spreadsheets to a systemised, repeatable and centralised process that is relevant and understandable to all users.

As these trends become more widespread and accepted professional practice, document digitisation and process will slowly but surely deliver increased business velocity and value.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ian Smith .