“All roads lead to Rome.” The idiom recalls a historically superior road system logically & consistently designed and well built. These sophisticated highways enabled quick, reliable transport for diverse goods and the empire’s rapid expansion. No matter where journeys originated, people would always reach the same endpoint: Rome. Over 250,000 miles of consistently engineered paths and highways helped legions travel efficiently toward a common destination. If only implementing and navigating a suite of document management software would be that consistent, reliable and easy…

Variety isn’t the spice of life when it comes to electronic document management (EDM).  Software suites sporting diverse interfaces and offering wide-ranging instruction and tool tips for installing, supporting, capturing, viewing, and managing information inhibit mobility as people try to accomplish simple tasks. Yet inconsistency is emblematic of most EDM systems today: after all, many suites began with a single component (imaging, archiving or records management), gradually ballooning into unwieldy suites with incompatible functionality. Thanks (or no thanks) to multiple mergers, acquisitions, and buyouts, few truly are suites designed with a consistent look and feel, are intuitive; or offering a single place for installation, configuration, and support. Inconsistency and incongruous design hinder efficient use, and inefficiency costs money. When managing information is challenging, significant hidden costs are added to the bottom line.

Determine the value of your content 
Not all information is equally valuable.  However, meaningful information stored on each document, image, or other medium should be securely and immediately accessible. Vital business content is as basic as a customer’s name or number, type of product purchased, or purchase date (needed for multiple business processes) to make informed decisions. Typically workers must access multiple systems; copying, pasting, and screen-scraping needed content from one place to another. Alternatively, they must request it from colleagues and await a reply. Avoiding this cumbersome process is only possible when systems are well integrated and EDM has a logical, unified, and centralized interface from which commands are executed and information is accessed.

Use valuable content meaningfully
If you’ve read the articles in previous issues, you understand EDM’s role in ensuring that business-critical information is logically stored, thoroughly indexed, securely accessible, and instantly found when it’s needed. Business process management (BPM) goes further, letting you define business rules to push and pull important information wherever it’s routinely needed within standard business processes, ensuring its meaningful use. This expedites decision making, streamlining human involvement to handling exceptions and other areas requiring analysis and critical thinking.   

Consider meaningful use of information in a routine request for insurance coverage.  Think about some of the information that’s gathered:
• customer name
• type of product or coverage requested
• application date
• amount of coverage requested

Whether information systems are still on paper, mixed media, or fully digital, some of this information is subsequently used to pull up previous claims, payment history, risk, and more. With EDM and BPM in place, you could:

• use application dates to auto-prioritize incoming applications, ensuring sequential processing
• re-route work as needed to alternate underwriters
• launch applications automatically into appropriate review queues, together with supporting documentation, for the assigned underwriter as it’s scanned or submitted online
• use customer name and ID to automatically pull up historical information for the underwriter to assist in enabling informed decisions
• extract and push customer name, contact information, coverage, purchase date, and other vital data automatically into the invoicing software immediately upon approval via • single mouse click, expediting billing and eliminating potential billing errors from re-keyed information

Re-using information meaningfully as it’s collected lets you:
            • Avoid manually re-creating information for multiple systems
            • Shorten turnaround times and offer better, faster service
            • Ensure business-critical content is available everywhere it has value, from the moment it’s collected.

Demand more from the technologies you own
Many organizations under-utilize EDM and BPM by neglecting to integrate it with their information systems enterprise-wide. Doing work two, three, or ten times faster is laudable, but if you’re still doing it multiple times, in different ways, in several systems (such as re-keying transactional information into your customer database, policy administration, and accounting systems), you’re missing opportunities for efficiency and savings. Industry-standard Web services connect systems behind the scene, giving each end user only the functionality they need from EDM and BPM to expedite tasks. Whether they routinely need to launch workflows, extract information from other systems, extract specific images for review, or initiate automated calls and customized letters, they can do it all using familiar screens and systems, dramatically shortening the learning curve and dramatically expediting turnaround.

Make work easier with a uniform interface
Whenever people adopt new technology and methods, several universal truths reappear:

• A consistent interface where everything looks, feels, and works the same makes products easier to use, encouraging faster and more thorough end-user adoption
• Ease of use, where the user doesn’t have to consider how or where to access functional components or how to make them work, leads to faster processing
• Quicker processing results in higher output, giving users more time to address other business needs 

Uniformity is critical to adoption.  Adoption is vital to success.

Get started on the right foot

What does a unified interface mean for you and your customers?  The ability to handle more business, more quickly?using fewer resources?for a lower cost.  Where can you find a product line that offers this?  One option is Optical Image Technology’s latest release of its DocFinity suite (www.docfinity.com).  The re-designed and re-architected product line, built from the ground up, answers the call for a fully integrated, browser-based suite.  Its single web-based interface lets you configure, administer, support, and manage all of the suite’s functionality within the browser, wherever you are, whenever access is needed or convenient. A centralized and unified approach to IT significantly streamlines the learning curve for IT administrators and end users alike.  AIIM (www.aiim.org) has an excellent library of information.  From best practices to white papers and vendor information, it’s a hub of useful information about managing documents and information throughout the information lifecycle. Knowing what you need to achieve, creating well-planned roadways that address those needs, and choosing products that sport a unified menu of functionality and how-to verbiage in ways that users understand will help to ensure that your goals are reached.

Laurel Sanders is the director of public relations and communications for Optical Image Technology.  For information about the company’s award-winning suite of DocFinity software, visit www.docfinity.com