The digital decade of transformation

This month we stumbled across an old PDF copy of our PacSol newsletter from August 2012 – produced pretty much 10 years ago to the day. Things have certainly changed –  just in the creation and distribution of a newsletter for starters – a far higher degree of integration and content automation than 10 years ago which is the trend across most sectors including digital transformation.

Aside from preparing for the Olympic experience of London 2012 (yes it was 10 years ago!), what were PacSol talking about that August:

Invoice Processing

Today’s document management systems need to include invoice automation options as standard to be seriously considered but 10 years ago invoice processing was only really implemented by the largest of accounts departments and was a relatively custom setup process. Invoice processing has come a long way since with pre-configured invoice process automation from DocuWare and INVU (Verify) allowing the deployment of a new solution in days rather than months. With manual processing costing between £4 – £25 per invoice, automation can make serious savings, reducing costs to less than £1 per invoice. Of course PacSol still provides solutions utilising Kofax (Capture / KTM) and IBM (DataCap) alongside DocuWare and Invu, allowing us to provide the most appropriate solution for the customer.

The average UK dwelling price (Q1, 2022) is £330,000 (10 years ago it was £254000) and in the UK, the average business receives 323 invoices a month.

If the average business implemented automation to the accounts payable process, in one year the savings would be between £11500 – £93000. Over 10 years, the value of those savings could amount to almost 3 average houses in the UK!

Remote access

With London 2012 came pressures on Britain’s travel infrastructure with priority lanes on major roads restricting normal traffic capacity and spectators flooding the rail systems to attend events.  Business started to seriously consider the (temporary) option of allowing some to work from home for the duration. Mobile apps related to document capture were emerging and most content platforms had web interfaces that could be utilised from outside the office. 10 years down the road, with the increase in cloud hosting and the impact of Covid-19, using a document management platform offers the same experience regardless of location to employees.  Whole departments can share, collaborate and interact with content in a modern document management system to complete everyday tasks seamlessly, efficiently and from any location. Content can be captured via mobile applications, desktop or central post room scanners, mailbox import automation, third party application integration and then managed through its lifecycle, ultimately perhaps purged by automation to prevent a compliance violation

Business Process Management (BPM)

Whilst invoice processing is automation specifically targeting the accounts department and integrating into existing account systems, BPM is the more generalised use of automation to expedite and enhance business processes. Whilst conceptually the underlying concepts of workflow and wider integrations into existing infrastructure (such as email) have not changed in the last decade, the cost and ease of implementation have changed dramatically. DocuWare for example supports around 500 different application integrations! Shared security has meant document management platforms utilising business process tools can now seamlessly integrate with the wider systems environment to import, export, message, update interrogate – these days the chances are the document management system will integrate rather than will not.

A lot has changed in 10 years , however, the digital transformation of business processes and the implementation of a centralised, secure content repository will still save your business time and money now, as it did then and will in the future. 

So what is your biggest business game changer of the last 10 years?

Toby Gilbertson, Customer Services Manager. July 2022

#PacSolUK #DocumentManagement #DigitalTransformation #BusinessProcessAutomation #InvoiceProcessing