The primary drivers for automating business processes are enhanced user productivity and significant cost savings, achieved by reallocating staff or eliminating the need for additional hires. In an era of increasing organisational transparency and growing data value, companies failing to harness their digital content fully will find themselves trailing behind their more adept competitors.

All organisations create, consume, and share digital data, yet most companies are slow to invest in upgrading, modernising, or even implementing automated business processes. For large enterprises, these systems’ importance is evident; with thousands of people needing to collaborate and access shared content remotely, a business could not run without them. At the same time, smaller organisations might rely on conventional methods like email, phone calls, and hand deliveries. However, content sharing, scalability, and efficiency optimisation require adopting a secure digital platform capable of organising, managing, and facilitating content access.

The Docuworx content management platform surpasses many legacy sync-and-share applications in sophistication. In addition to robust, secure document storage, it offers advanced intelligent functions, including granular permissions for precise access control, automated data extraction, embedded analytics for data insights, contract management, and real-time collaboration tools, making it a comprehensive platform for modern businesses.

At Docuworx, we’ve also discovered that for small to medium businesses (SMBs), defined here as organisations with fewer than 100 employees, every dollar invested in content management and automated processes yields a remarkable return of $8.55.                                   To gauge this value, we meticulously sought case studies from customers involving small businesses that implemented a Docuworx platform and reaped substantial benefits.

Our focus was on studies conducted within the past four years, as the widespread adoption of our cloud platform has significantly impacted the value proposition of automating business processes during this period.

Key Benefits

The main benefits of investing in the Docuworx platform include boosted productivity, cost savings from redeployed staff and avoided hires, better compliance, and reduced risk due to better records management.

• Boosted Productivity: On average, productivity saw a remarkable surge of 46 per cent, with one client achieving an astounding 80 per cent improvement. Even the most conservative estimate showed a 30 per cent enhancement. Thanks to structured directories, robust document search functionalities, automation of processes, and evolving functions centred on document metadata; staff members can swiftly locate and retrieve documents following implementation. Eliminating the time once squandered on sifting through disorderly directories and filing systems, enabling them to redirect their energies toward more value-added tasks.
• Cost savings: Through staff optimisation, every examined implementation featured in this report either effectively redeployed existing staff or circumvented the need for additional hires. With the swift and efficient content retrieval process and the retirement of physical systems, companies can readily scale up without incurring additional system complexity or expenses. In one notable instance, a customer reduced its AP processing team by an impressive 60 per cent, thanks to the efficiencies achieved by implementing the Docuworx platform.
• Reduced risk: Thanks to enhanced records management, effective management is paramount in today’s high-stakes business landscape. Businesses cannot afford the risks associated with mishandling customer or company data. By centralising document management and harnessing advanced functionalities such as process automation, companies can establish standardised procedures for handling sensitive information. Access controls and governance tools mitigate the risk of data loss or mishandling.

Best Practices

We also analysed our customer feedback across all case studies to pinpoint the most widely recommended best practices applicable to similar organisations. The recurring suggestions include maximising automation opportunities, consolidating document storage to eliminate silos, and capitalising on the platform’s flexibility to sidestep time-consuming self-builds and extensive configuration experiments.

• Embrace the Power of Automation: Significant time and cost savings await organisations that master the automation of repetitive tasks such as invoice processing and contract management. Automation minimises human errors and liberates employees to engage in more value-added activities. To ensure a seamless transition from human to automated task management, meticulous end-to-end process definition and standardisation are vital.
• The elimination of human touchpoints should be thoroughly tested before deployment in a production environment to prevent business disruptions. Information seems natural to settle in disparate silos by department, region, or user. However, this can restrict information flow throughout the organisation, creating blind spots and inefficiencies.
• While not all users can or should be able to access a company’s digital assets, by centralising as much content as possible, organisations can maximise overall visibility and eliminate many of the expensive and time-consuming inefficiencies around searching for files and transferring them between disconnected silos.
• Maximise Efficient Implementation: Maintaining project timelines and budgets is crucial in any implementation. To ensure successful outcomes, organisations should consider exercising caution regarding excessive customisation, which may involve extensive custom code and configurations. Striking a balance between leveraging out-of-the-box solutions for swift implementation and intricate custom functionality that aligns seamlessly with the organisation’s broader application ecosystem is essential for success.

 CONCLUSION

Embracing Digital Transformation: Many businesses are eagerly embracing the concept of ‘digital transformation,’ with document management emerging as a prime starting point. Organisations lacking a cohesive and standardised strategy for efficiently harnessing their digital assets risk falling behind in today’s competitive landscape. By seamlessly integrating automated functionality and data extraction capabilities, facilitated by cutting-edge AI  technology capable of ‘reading’ data fields on documents and storing the data in a centralised, structured database, companies can automatically extract and analyse data from their digital content repositories to extract valuable business insights.

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues improving, forward-thinking companies that can automate data extraction and analysis while maintaining robust digital content governance can anticipate unlocking incremental ROI through a data-driven strategy.