Streamlining document creation and other task chains to make operations smarter

A document is more than just a piece of paper. It’s a chance to add a new patient to your healthcare clinic or an opportunity to introduce a new product to your customers. Every organization deals with some kind of document to keep operations running. As organizations look to grow, they’ll quickly find that their manual processes hold them back from greatness.

That’s why your organization needs document workflow solutions. These systems help businesses automate document creation, ingestion, and assignment, developing task chains that give employees everything they need to work more efficiently. Here, we’ll explore what these solutions do and how they can help your organization work smarter than ever.

What are document workflow solutions?

Document workflow solutions are critical tools for managing large volumes of digital documents and the tasks that rely on them. They combine several powerful tools:

• Centralized access and storage to house documents for immediate use and archives.
• Automation of manual steps in document processing workflows.
• Optical character recognition to automatically transform digital images of text into usable real-text documents.
• Search capabilities to make it easy to find any workflow or document an employee needs.
• User access management to keep sensitive information secure and ensure employees only have access to what they need.
• Collaborative tools to enable employees, stakeholders, and external users to create and share documents.
• Analytics tools to give you deeper insights into what’s working and what isn’t.

With a document workflow solution, you can streamline hundreds of individual document creation and approval processes into replicable task flows, improving productivity at scale.

How document workflow solutions streamline processes: A practical example

Imagine you work in sales at a web design agency that builds and maintains websites for small businesses. This process requires an up-front payment for the design, then switches to monthly payments for upkeep. To make financial forecasting more consistent, you require at least a one-year hosting agreement after the site is completed, with the opportunity to re-sign for another year after the term has finished.

Of course, you’ll need a sales contract laying out all this information. In addition to the standard boilerplate, it should be customized based on the price and terms you’ve set with the client, any add-ons the client has purchased, and any unique requests the client has made during the negotiation process. The contract must be written up, approved by a lawyer, signed by both parties, and then securely stored for future reference.

If you’re managing this entire process by hand, you’re not just corralling clients, lawyers, and other employees to help get this contract process moving. You’re also mentally juggling deadlines alongside the legal requirements and client needs that must be included in the final, signed document. When it’s time to renegotiate the contract at the end of the term, you’ll have to have some way of tracking when that’s supposed to happen and where you’ve stored the contract. And you’ll have to do this for every client you bring on board.

With a document workflow solution, automation takes care of most of that for you. The platform will track the flow of tasks from contract creation to signature to archival. It’ll also track everyone involved with each step of the process, pinging them when their tasks are ready to work on and notifying the next assignee once their step is complete. What could have been a significant road back to efficiency and growth now runs seamlessly.

Did You Know?:If your organization has multiple locations, our remote distributed scanning solutions reduce the need for costly shipments while increasing efficiency.

The benefits of document workflow solutions

Here are a few ways document workflow solutions can help your team work more effectively.

Faster, more efficient workflows

Manual processes may be sufficient when you’re only working with a few clients. But if you’re trying to grow, you’ll quickly find that doing everything by hand inhibits your ability to scale. With automation, you can speed up the completion of highly-repeatable tasks, giving your team more time to spend on providing excellent service.

Reduced human error

Every opportunity to create something by hand is an opportunity to introduce mistakes into your workflow. A failed hand-off, missing documents, or even spelling errors can cause unnecessary confusion and increase the time and resources spent on completing projects. With automated document workflow solutions, you can use pre-set templates (or create your own), ensuring every project is set up right the first time, every time.

More accountability

Ever wonder if your co-worker finished that task so you can get started on the next step of the project? Have you ever spent valuable time hunting down stakeholders for project signoff? Document workflow solutions can surface accountability for you automatically, assigning the appropriate employee to each task and alerting them when it’s time to start working on their part. Once completed, it’ll alert the proper team members so they can begin the next steps. And your solution will maintain records of who did what, giving you complete visibility into the entire process.

A single source of truth

When documents are scattered and disorganized, employees will spend more time hunting down business-critical information than actually doing work. With all internal and client-facing documentation stored within a central digital repository, everyone can access the same information whether they’re working at the office, at home, or thousands of miles away. Easy-to-use search functionality makes surfacing information a snap, making document retrieval times faster than ever.

Did You Know?:Ricoh’s fi Series and ScanSnap scanners make document management simple, thanks to high-resolution image quality and accurate OCR software features.

Ricoh can help you navigate the document management ecosystem

Need a hand sifting through the document workflow solutions on the market to find one that meets your needs? Ricoh is here for you. We have decades of experience helping organizations like yours navigate their digitization journey. Whether you’re looking for powerful hardware and third-party software solutions to transform your paperwork systems or simply looking for advice, we’re available to answer any questions you might have as you work to make operations more efficient.

Looking for a guide to the modern document solutions ecosystem? Download our free ebook today and learn how to navigate a complex technological landscape with ease. Need a more in-depth assessment of your document infrastructure? Contact one of our experts today, and we’ll help solve your problem.

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