Having dropped in to a local B2B (business to business) event this week and spent a little time...
These days many of us wear different hats throughout our working day – customer services, sales, support, marketing, project planning, implementation engineer… I think you get the idea. Keeping track of all the associated work across these virtual desks can be tricky especially if the employee is left to manage their case / task load independently.
Whilst you may be in luck and have the world’s most organised employee, being reliant on self-governance does open up the
process to error (forgotten tasks, missed deadlines etc), difficulties in cover (should the employee be away for any period of time) and a lack of oversight (audit).
So what can you do about it?
Every department task is driven by different triggers – the action that generates the need for your employee to react. An HR department for example could have work items created by a complaint letter, CV submission, office walk-in, phone call etc and each of these could take a different format in how they arrive – PDF as an email attachment, text within the body of a plain text email, printed CV with a handwritten cover letter, conversation recorded using a mobile phone (audio file), MS Word, MS Excel, TXT, Open Office…
Now assume that the employee not only has responsibility for HR but perhaps also customer services and helps provide cover for pre-sales – not an unusual scenario for the smaller business. Now include the added 2020 ‘bonus’ of a dispersed workforce…
There are of course specialist, targeted applications that are designed to help specific departments manage day to day business processes but these often lack integration with each other meaning the single employee is potentially reviewing / managing three independent workstreams with multiple entry points.
This is where a document management solution with intelligent capture and business process management (workflow) shows its strength. Able to adapt to any department, ingest content from multiple streams (email, paper, automated feeds…), automatically capture data, categorise and securely store those incoming documents. Once on the platform, the various identified document types and/or their content trigger the tasks, assigned to the relevant user (or group of users) to be dealt with – full audit and accountability. Potentially the entire task could be automated given the right configuration and processing rules giving more time back to the employee for the more complex work items. With one platform tracking business processes across all departments, collaboration becomes instant, task sharing easy, bottlenecks obvious and accessible whether in the office, working from home or out on a mobile device.
But what about the specialist software – accounts packages for instance, an EDM/ECM platform cannot perform accounting functions but it can make the process easier with simple integration points – automated, secure storage of generated quotations, purchase orders, invoices, payment notifications and delivery notes with simple retrieval from within the accounts package. Business process triggers based on those document actions can then be automated, for example, requesting budget approval from a manager (or multiple department managers) – employees no longer need to take the time to email a copy of the quotation / invoice to the relevant approvers, collate and record their responses – the document management platform handles that process with a full audit trail. The document is shared / viewed directly from the secure repository so there are no copies moving around the network or company workstations and urgent approvals can be gained quickly.
Now in the context of our multi-role scenario, it becomes obvious how taking control of content, automating and centralising the key ‘shared’ processes within departments can significantly improve the throughput and manageability of daily tasks within any business. Think of your business’s current ‘pain’ points? Where do your business processes stall or bottleneck? It is possible, if not quite probable, that a business process management platform could help.
If you would like to investigate further how document management with BPM could enhance your business process management and provide a solution to your business’s ‘pain’ points, please get in touch with us today to discuss how we can help.
*terrible abuse of English language
Toby Gilbertson, Customer Services Manager. October 2022
(originally posted Oct 2020)
#PacSolUK #DigitalTransformation #DocumentManagement #BusinessProcessAutomation
