If there has been any common theme amid the impact of the events of the last few years on organizations worldwide, it was showing business leaders that it’s important to build resilience into their organizations – proving the principle that it is better to be a camel than a unicorn.
McKinsey dedicated an entire 200+ page report to building resilience – two of the main themes are building operational resilience and accelerating end-to-end digitization.
However, even now some analysts peg resilience and efficiency into opposite corners of the spectrum of organizational focus. For example, this article by Gartner suggests to focus on resilience rather than efficiency.
As the McKinsey report pointed out, with deployment of transformative technologies, you can have both efficiency and resilience. This applies to document automation, among a number of others.
Let’s have a closer look at how documents, and content in general, relate to organizational resilience.
If you study functions of your organization, you’ll discover that production of customized content proliferates throughout. Starting with marketing – brochures and product materials that need to be kept up to date and compliant; sales – proposals and customer onboarding; contracts; provision of goods or services – goods require manuals and documentation, services are defined by statements of work; human resources – employment contracts; finance and accounting – invoices, receipts; and reports – audits, regulatory and internal reports.
In order to keep acquiring new customers, marketing material and sales proposals are critical. In order to generate revenue, contracts are critical. In order to collect revenue, invoices and accounting documentation need to be issued and processed.
As document or content generation is everywhere, the ability to efficiently and accurately produce documentation is critical for the organization’s resilience under adversarial or simply new post-pandemic circumstances in order to ensure business continuity.
The bottom line is that businesses can’t operate without documents - and the content within those documents. The more your business is digitized, the more you can automate it, including your document-centric processes.
To illustrate it in a business context: If we build a team of people for manual or semi-automated production of documents, then the team will require more personnel than theoretically needed to account for leave time, sickness etc. If the same process can be fully automated – people are no longer involved in the document production itself. This is more efficient and also more resilient: the unexpected absence of a team member doesn’t stop the business from producing documents.
The diagram below paints a more complete picture of how document automation can make your organization more resilient.
Document automation contributes to resilience of organizations on multiple levels.
We'll look into each of the benefits in more detail.
When document creation is automated, one person can handle several orders of magnitude more transactions – for example – one of our clients reduced the time for preparation of a proposal from 7 hours to 3 minutes.
Changes to content and documents and the relevant business rules can be put in place in minutes and be rolled out immediately. For example, our clients could put Covid-19 related clauses in place and deploy those clauses globally in the affected areas, taking care of lockdown situations, state or national variation, within minutes of the wording being produced by their legal team. Automation can ensure that all new contracts include these clauses – a fast and comprehensive response to real time change requests.
Once automated templates are tested and reviewed, document generation can all but eliminate human error. Every document will be 100% accurate, every time. Regardless of how busy or tired the person who needs the document is. Even manual data entry can undergo verification by including checking methodologies or automated verification as a part of the process.
Automation removes the mundane tasks from document creation and potentially frees an employee to focus on higher value tasks requiring greater expertise. It enables document creators to focus on building automated templates, defining what should be going into documents and letting the document automation software execute it, rather than having to copy & paste the content themselves with every new document, taking time, and risking costly copy & paste errors or omissions.
Some lines of business are simply not viable sources of income unless automation is put in place. A number of our clients, who operated in a market addressing the needs of large organizations, were able to engage successfully at mid-market levels, a first for them, thanks to the fact that all document generation necessary for sales, contracts and other business operations could be fully automated.
A number of our clients have deployed document automation to enable fully automatic e-fulfilment of their client’s requests. For example, a prospective customer can request a life insurance quote online. The entered details of the applicant are evaluated and the quote is generated and sent to the potential client who then has the ability to accept the quote online. Once accepted, the custom summary of coverage is generated and sent to the client. The client can then choose to pay by direct debit or credit card and the transaction is completed. In addition to being fully automatic and resilient, this model is also incredibly scalable.
If your core document creators become temporarily incapacitated, the document production continues without any disruption. Their knowledge has been captured in automated templates.
The criticality of the document automation system for the operations of a business is on par with that of essential email and phone systems. Without document production capability businesses can slow dramatically or even grind to a halt.
With document production automated using a robust document automation software, your resilient and efficient organization can become ready to face the uncertainty of the changing world and be well positioned to find ways to benefit from these changes.
Martin Srubar
Senior Technology Evangelist
Martin’s engineering background and his passion for great products whether in physical or software form are complemented by his understanding of ActiveDocs applications and how they meet the requirements and fit the architecture of the company’s clients. Martin continues to engage with potential and existing customers, adding market intelligence and customer feedback into the company’s ongoing product development strategy.
