Paper may not be the primary means by which information travels in your business today, but the traditional document format often survives in digital form. In fact, documents often remain the primary informational organizing principal, limiting the benefits you might realize from digitization efforts.
To fully capture the value of digitization, your business needs to be able to access the information stored in documents in real time to support process automation, business intelligence and sales intelligence efforts.
The Benefits of Digital Document Management
There is no doubt business benefit from moving documents into a centralized network. Keeping all of your company’s documents in a central repository provides better access, security and preservation of the information that powers your business. A good cloud-based system can even provide remote access to the documents to connect employees in multiple locations and to those working remotely to save time and keep information in sync throughout the organization.
However, if you stop your digitization efforts at this point you are missing out on even bigger business efficiencies and service improvements. Consider, for example, the ability to build custom views of data stored in different documents to speed service response times.
Process Automation Can Power Service Champions
Imagine a service business getting a call from a customer who needs a visit before their next appointment. Without process automation, it could take hours or even a couple of days for the request to wind its way from support (where the original request is logged) to service (who gets an emailed request and has to check schedules before identifying a technician with an availability) and back to the customer (who gets a call or email from the technician to let them know when they can be there).
With automation, a service request could make all those connections in the background in minutes, finding an available technician, texting the technician to have them confirm the new appointment, and informing the support team and the customer of the appointment details. If the company desired, the automation could even adjust the future appointments to restore the desired frequency disrupted by the new appointment.
Besides saving time, an automated process can eliminate errors, improve the efficiency of service teams and greatly improve the customer experience. Best of all, if the data to power automation is already digitized, the automation work can be affordable and completed relatively quickly, complementing rather than replacing your existing systems.
Since 2004, Triple Helix has provided data and information systems for the aerospace and manufacturing industries, as well as businesses in the service, healthcare, and non-profit sectors. Contact us if you would like to schedule a risk-free consultation to see if Triple Helix can help your company better organize, access, and analyze your data.
