We find ourselves talking to a lot of our clients across different industries all with similar challenges. That is, converting the data that is trapped in their documents into useful information that can be utilised to drive change, increase efficiency and drive profitability back into their businesses. We see business leaders and their colleagues now ready to begin the Digital Transformation journey in order to remain competitive and relevant in today’s marketplace. We see traditional workflow processes being challenged by the new generation of managers and backed by their trusted business leaders. Here are some points on how to turn your unstructured data into your organisation’s asset.
Your data is trapped in unstructured documents.
The rise of data, content and document volume is unprecedented. This widespread growth makes managing all your company’s information nearly impossible, as 80% to 90% of it is unstructured data. With analysts predicting an even faster, 10-fold growth rate of data over the next 5 years, the global data sphere will be hard to manage. Whether it’s paper documents, emails, chats, PDFs or other types, the information is often inaccessible, unsearchable and requires manual processes to unlock that data. If an organisation doesn’t have a comprehensive view of their data, they can’t create context or drive business intelligence.
How do you begin to manage all this data?
Whatever ECM strategy or what ERP system your company uses, or even better, if you don’t have an ERP system and your Data is sitting in your company’s network drives;
To reclaim this lost time and dramatically improve efficiency, you need a vision for where you want to go and how you’re going to get there. The best way to start is by developing a strategy for tackling your document management problems. Ideally, you would begin by identifying your pain points and the areas of your business that have the greatest need, and then put together a plan of attack. Here are 6 Steps for your plan:
- Focus on improving a single department or even a single process
- Create a single source of truth
- Make sure your current solution is capable of handling all the documents and electronic files your process requires
- Create a distributed capture environment
- Create a workflow, and don’t be afraid to improve upon it
- Be aggressive and escalate once you’ve mastered the first steps.
You can free your data
Turn Data into Assets. Rather than typing in data and routing it via paper or email, capture it and digitise the content from the start, initiating the digital transformation process. Next, using the power of supervised machine learning, our Solution automatically identifies the document type, extracts key information and delivers it directly to any type of repository or workflow. Even better, each time a user is alerted to make a correction, the system becomes smarter, learning new layouts and document types over time.
Automation for repetitive workflows
From Data Entry to Invoice Automation:
If you are in a finance department for example, at some point in your career, you’ve probably manually entered data from invoices such as company name, invoice number, total amount and other critical information. Let’s face it – keying in your data is a bit mundane and a more strategic task would get your synapses firing, right? We understand! It’s hard to get out from under the boring work to be more forward-thinking.
With the right solution, you could automate many processes over and above AP and look further. For instance, HR on-boarding departments handling huge numbers of Change Requests, or Sales Automation for departments which handle loan origination processes.
But how to take the journey.
Make it a project and take a step by step approach. You don’t need to eliminate all data Silos at once.
Focus on creating a single source of truth for a specific department.
Give it the project the attention it deserves – It’ll pay generous dividends!
Follow the 6 Steps of the small action plan.
Good Luck in your Document and Process Digital Transformation, if you want to find out more visit our site or contact our consultants.
