Have you ever gone looking for a document in your file cabinet, shared drive, or even jumped person to person in your office and been unable to find it? 

Have you manually entered documents in your system only to discover it is a duplicate with errors? 

Have you ever had a security scare that could potentially put clients' personal information at risk? 

If you are thinking yes to any of these, imagine what it would look like if your daily business processes moved smoothly from beginning to end, your documents were easily accessible while staying organized and secure, and there were minimal errors and duplicates. 

Sound too good to be true? Well, it's not! This what automation can bring to your organization. 

What Is Automation?

Automation can be described as utilizing technology to not only digitize, but also automate document-centric workflows managing your enterprise's content from creation to storage. Upon intake or creation, records are stored securely so they can be easily referenced by those who need them and impossible to reach by those without access. 

Document Management (DMS) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems have been in use by organizations for years to serve this purpose. They provide a central repository for digital content and records to be stored securely. 

In most cases, documents are indexed manually as they are scanned in or created. This, of course, requires a significant time investment to ensure all records are properly cataloged in the correct location and with the correct data. This manual effort inherently leads to errors, indexing documents with inaccurate data or storing duplicate records. Employees looking to save time will inevitably store records outside of your repository or store them with minimal metadata. 

To solve these problems, ECM providers, such as Laserfiche, have added workflow and business process management (BPM) tools to manage content through drafting and review processes. These workflows not only make your company more efficient, but they also ensure documents are tracked and kept secure throughout the entire process. The system can also take data created from the process to determine how records are indexed, searched for, and retained for compliance. This metadata is what really allows document automation to come into play. 

The best document repositories store not only the document, but also metadata related to that document. Think of an HR Record, for example. We can use metadata such as employee ID, department, position, and name to drive document automation. 

In the HR example, the employee's ID lets us know whose folder the record belongs in. The department or position of the employee lets us know who in our leadership structure may have access to their record. Additional information may help us in storing the record in the appropriate subfolder, searching for the document, and managing the record's lifecycle by the appropriate retention schedule. 

By providing this data to a workflow or automation engine, we can take the responsibility of properly indexing documents away from the employee and index records automatically. The more we automate, the less likely it is for data errors and duplicate records. Employees are also more likely to store content within your repository as the process takes much less time. 

With automation tools such as BPM engines and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), much of our document processing can be automated when human review or creativity is not needed. In many cases, data entry has become the most labor-intensive part of the process. So how do we capture this metadata to achieve straight-through processing with minimal manual intervention? 

There are three primary means for capturing data without paying for manual data entry:

• Using an online form or portal to get data from an external submitter 
• Integrate with another system of record or ingest data files sharing a unique ID with our records 
• Automatically extracting the data from the document directly 

By automating data entry, we can actually realize end-to-end document management automation, granting staff easy access to the information they need while effortlessly maintaining and demonstrating compliance. 

At Majime, we regularly implement all three methods, but what really sets us apart is our expertise in the third method. We have engineers and consultants who specialize in implementing intelligent data capture technology to extract data directly from the document and pass it automatically. For complex use cases, such as healthcare records and claims, we have proven that we can accurately capture data when our competitors cannot. 

Sounds like a game-changer, huh? 

What Are the Benefits of Automation?

If you rely on manual tasks to create, sort, store and share information, it is a great idea to consider the benefits of document management automation. By implementing document automation, benefits can include, but are not limited to:

• Free staff from repetitive data entry tasks, so they have time to work on value-added tasks like sales and customer service
• Eliminate inconsistencies with how content is organized, secured, and maintained
• Reduce labor costs by automating document classification to increase profitability
• Maintain strict control over your content from creation to final disposition
• Be able to demonstrate compliance quickly and easily during audits