Everyone is being bombarded with news regarding the housing melt-down and the associated ‘credit crisis’ affecting Wall Street. The question facing many businesses across the country is: “How will a worsening economy impact our business?” The exact answer to that question requires a crystal ball and keen understanding of economics. Having said that, there are things you can to focus on regardless of the future economic predictions that will affect your bottom line.
There are countless areas of your business that can be streamlined by leveraging a quality document management tool. Too often companies fail to investigate their internal operational efficiencies until there is a driving factor that negatively impacts revenue. Take the time to examine your document flows throughout your organization. More than likely you will find processes that could benefit from document management which will save you time and money.
For example, imagine a solution that can reduce operating costs while increasing your capacity to provide value to your customers. Listed below is a small sampling of solutions built upon Document Locator’s framework that provide high return on investments for customers.
- Customer Service Representatives – Provide instant access to records allowing customer service representatives to quickly answer questions and forward documents to people requesting information. This is done by bringing electronic documents and paper documents into an indexed, searchable document repository. Scanning paper documents also frees up office space, improves disaster recovery options, and reduces time associated with filing and re-filing paperwork.
- Digital Signatures for Document Approvers – Use the digital signature technology included in Adobe Acrobat as part of an electronic workflow approval process for efficient, verifiable document approval processes. This enables employees to easily and securely approve documents from their office, or remotely via web access.
- Unified Storage for Project Team Members – Provide your project teams with a central location to access invoices, drawings, email communications, contracts, and more. This eliminates searching for documents distributed across email servers, accounting software packages, project management software, shared file servers, and more.
In an economic downturn, financial and human resources get stretched. Simply throwing more resources at a problem is not realistic. Rather, this is the time to invest in productivity tools that allow your organization to accomplish more with your existing resources.
The good news is that most of the businesses I work with are ‘cautiously optimistic’ about the future. However, their opinions might be skewed from the wider market only because these are ColumbiaSoft customers that are already invested in document management technology… so it could be said that they already have the competitive advantage of an implemented document management system allowing their employees to spend more time working on core competencies that drive revenue. By operating a lean, efficient organization, companies can be well-positioned to thrive in times of prosperity and economic turmoil where others struggle.
