Today’s digital technology offers modern workplaces many opportunities to optimize and streamline common tasks. An area that can greatly benefit from automation is document workflow. Automation can not only increase your efficiency and productivity, it has been shown that it can lead to a significant reduction in costs.
Before you get started, here are some things you need to know:
Benefits of Automation
By reducing human input, you are also reducing the error rate, along with its associated costs. At the same time, document workflow automation allows employees to focus on revenue-generating tasks instead of data entry and filing tasks. Work can be more closely monitored, which helps to enhance regulatory compliance.
The print environment is the perfect place to start looking for inefficiencies. By deploying assessment software a Managed Print Services provider can quickly identify paper-intensive areas of your business that would benefit the most from automation. In departments such as HR and Accounting, the benefits of automating tasks can be huge, with time and cost savings adding up to as much as 90%.
Questions to Ask
Once you know which processes are good candidates for automation, you can investigate further with a series of questions to help guide the automation process. Consider the following topics:
- Types of documents processed: invoices? forms? timesheets?
- Document storage, both currently and ideally
- Volume of documents that need to be processed
- What format are the documents in (i.e. pdf, email, paper)
- How will they be distributed, and to whom
- What systems do you currently have in place
- Is data entry necessary
- The level of automation desired
- Any special requirements, such as regulations and auditing needs
Digital automation can provide cost and time savings to your business, allowing employees to focus their time and talents on growing your business.
