Having dropped in to a local B2B (business to business) event this week and spent a little time observing the offers around, it became very clear that the word prominently featured on most service providers banners was automation.
Automation, as a small part of the digital transformation journey, is potentially the most effective way to not only reduce a company’s fiscal overheads but also the best way to allow employees to be more effective – removing the mundane to allow creativity, expertise and attention on the more complex tasks. In a previous blog, we reviewed the basic fundamentals of why BPA (Business Process Automation) is of benefit to businesses and went even further with ‘hyperautomation’ in another.
The manual processing of mundane, repeatable and regular tasks is always the main drain on resources within any company. Think about the low value invoice for a subscription where the only change to the document over a 12 month cycle is the invoice number and the date. Or the annual employee PAYE records that just need to be kept on file – no actual action required except its storage. Or cross checking information across multiple software applications to answer a customer query. All these tasks could either be automated to completion (storage / payment) or automate the sharing of information across platforms (status updates / value updates) to ensure a global view from one platform.
For us at PacSol (and do tell me if you have heard this before) the current automation trend is email – specifically streamlining the receipt → storage → process → action process to remove as much manual interaction as possible. Getting the message content, with relevant attachments, out of an inbox, into the central content management system and then shared to the relevant parties to perform action. (When I say ‘shared’ I don’t mean copied, duplicated or printed either, the stored content is accessed via link and simply referenced in any call to action).
PacSol’s own IEP (Inbound Email Processor) started life to meet this precise requirement whilst being far more cost effective than other offerings but since the initial inception, the IEP has become a far greater automation asset for ingestion of content than merely getting email from A to B. In fact such is the potential of the IEP tool, we are even discussing changing its name! Not sure the ‘PacSol Data Ingestor’, the ‘PacSol Content Process Platform’ or ‘PINCH’ (PacSol InBound Content Handler) are the right answer – perhaps we should run a competition to name our product?
Whilst paper documents are still very much part of the document management / digital transformation discussion, the world is slowly moving onwards towards supplying content in digital format. It is how this content is handled by business as an automatic function that will ultimately determine how much benefit from this switch is gained.
I challenge everyone reading this blog to take two minutes and look at your daily / weekly / monthly routines dealing with documentation and identify just one (I guarantee there are far more) that could quite simply be automated – a task that takes no real skill to complete, just time. When you have it, come and talk to us at PacSol and together we’ll make it happen.
Toby Gilbertson, Customer Services Manager. October 2022
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