Bullet-proof digital process automation

Improving employee productivity and efficiency - while retaining customers - has become the new focus for businesses seeking to improve profitability in the modern world. Competition has increased, giving customers more choice, while driving margins down.

But clever companies are rising to this challenge with the people and processes that enable them to do better business. Such organisations are turning to solutions ranging from process reengineering, information management and flow, and technology solutions through various forms of outsourcing to ensure quality, speedy customer response, drive efficiency and control spending.

However, despite the intense focus on cost-cutting and process improvement, there is one advance that to date, companies have largely failed to adopt. That advance is digital process automation (DPA), a concept that includes automated information capture (AIC), workflow, content management and business information delivery.

By eliminating paper-based processes at their start, organisations have an opportunity to greatly improve the speed and accuracy of interactions with customers, government departments and businesses, thereby creating a significant competitive advantage. The highest cost to company is manual/paper-based business processes such as information and data capture, and information and document delivery. This paper-based process is slow, fraught with bad information results, data inaccuracies, lost documents and appalling customer response times.

Ideally, companies should be able to quickly automate their business processes while also being sufficiently agile to optimise these processes over time. However, in practice, organisations often find themselves bound to the business rules hard-wired into enterprise applications because modifying backend software is prohibitively difficult and costly.

DPA solutions seek to turn the tables on this issue. These tools are designed to let organisations take a process-centric approach to business and to track corporate effectiveness. With many companies doing the same amount of work with fewer employees, process efficiency and information management is likely to present the next stage of business-IT innovation.

Organisations in our present business climate are driven by documents, and need robust yet simple document processes. They need to control and measure spending on document generation - because document creation is a remarkably expensive and wasteful process. Current document processes must be evaluated and improved, and effective DPA structures should be established to improve productivity, efficiency and profitability.

And within the gambit of DPA, a relatively old concept must also be reintroduced - that of `paperless` documents, or the electronic forms. We operate in a paper-centric world. The challenge today is the need for information capture from paper to electronic media to enable storage, workflow and reporting (MIS). These applications include complex user interface designs, data gathering and validation, wizard-like behaviours and spreadsheet computations that combine to improve the effectiveness of individuals, contributing to an overall increase in organisational efficacy.

By capturing transaction information - structured and unstructured - in an electronic format, managing it through a completely digital workflow, and archiving it in dedicated content management systems, organisational efficiencies can be achieved. The ability to track, auto-escalate and report is critical for businesses to measure and improve performance. Together, these complementary technologies enable business processes that integrate people, systems and data to form a platform for capturing, linking, routing and managing information as it moves through a business process.

The true challenge is translating improved processes using DPA into a reality that works within day-to-day operations. In automating business processes, organisations need to do more than put forms online. There needs to be a thorough examination of the existing processes and a focus on developing an intuitive system for users - because the risk of creating a DPA solution that users eschew is considerable, and potentially costly.

By introducing DPA, businesses can reduce costs, cycle time, user frustration and input errors, eliminate lost documents, while at the same time increasing speed of transactions, productivity, information integrity and access to relevant information. With DPA, information flows seamlessly through the organisation, minimising the number of steps needed to complete a transaction and the amount of time spent manually entering, correcting and searching for data. This also introduces management reports, escalation and accountability on all levels.

Presenting and receiving process information in an intelligent, user-friendly manner ensures that information is captured right the first time, decisions are made correctly, and process integrity is maintained from start to finish, across the business and externally to customers, partners and other parties. The result is an efficient, productive, smart and competitive business.

Both for financial reasons and for compliance with government regulations such as the Electronic Communications Act, an ever-increasing number of intricate electronic forms applications are being created to give astute companies the edge in terms of lower costs and greater profits.

The digital millennium is here today. It`s time for businesses to capitalise on the advances of the electronic age and improve their processes, workflows and document creation activities with a complete solution - and that solution is DPA.