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Digital Document Management – Increasing Productivity and Unleashing Insights

Team brainstorming process. Photo young creative managers crew working with new startup project in modern office. Contemporary notebook on wood table. Horizontal, film effect.

In our fast-paced world, where the internet is always a click or tap away, it’s hard to believe business is still conducted on paper. Yet when a loved one is admitted to the hospital, we fill out paper forms, and when we apply for a loan, we end up scanning multiple hard-copies to the bank for processing.

We use a cylinder-shaped instrument which is full of blue liquid to write on the pages. It looks like a stylus but reminds you of those retro writing tools that might bleed onto your hand on occasion. OK, so we aren’t that far in the future yet, but it often seems that way. It feels like the digital age should have rescued us from inefficiencies of paper by now. But instead, we’re stuck with:

  • Duplicate, lost, or damaged files
  • Time spent searching for documents
  • Lack of access, control, or permissions to secure documents digitally
  • Collaboration inefficiencies for authoring or editing purposes
  • Required manual signatures to validate or approve documents

Many of these obstacles only apply to paper documents, and if they’re digital? Chances are they haven’t been processed by a document management application. Consider file formats like TIFF, JPEG, or PNG that aren’t even thoroughly profiled with metadata. That can cause an issue. The solution? Document management solutions.

In our latest eGuide, we go in-depth to discuss the top five factors to consider when selecting a document management application for your organization. But as a teaser, let’s share a bit about each here:

 


 

1. Business Process Agility

The ideal digital document management application will enable your organization to create, capture, store, discover, collaborate on, transport and secure your documents as needed. To keep pace with your hospital staff, contract managers, in-house attorneys, or other information workers. You need an application that can process documents to do all of these activities without causing needless complexity or business interruption.

 


 

2. Enhance Your Application with Document Management

Business applications like CRM, EHR, and bank management software are rich with transactional data. Yet documents like forms, patient records, and contracts add context. Software and SaaS vendors provide their own application program interface (API) hooks to interact with a variety of document management platforms. Interoperable APIs and SDK plugins provide the critical document management functions you need, without the complexity and development overhead you don’t.

 


 

3. Collaborate on Documents Within Your Platform

Just as the data within your core business applications change, so does the business context behind it. Enabling teams to mark up, redact, and modify documents empowers your employees or customers to edit documents in real-time. Consider how events like corporate mergers or legal discovery preparation could be better addressed by collaborative document review within a data room or case management application.

 


 

4. Digital Signatures for Workflow Approval

As digital signatures have become mainstream for agreements across industries like financial services, government, and healthcare, the need for APIs and SDKs to embed this functionality into software has increased. Managing user licenses and testing the compatibility for stand-alone e-Signature applications can be a costly nuisance. An integrated SaaS plugin makes supporting electronic approvals affordable and easy-to-use.

 


 

5. Making Data Discoverable Within Your Document Libraries

Electronic document storage grows rapidly, and metadata alone provides information workers with limited visibility to critical information within each file. Adding functions like barcode, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) allows your employees to discover the data they need within the content of documents in your archives and applications.

Want to know more about how document management APIs and SDKs can increase the productivity of your teams, without the hassle of disrupting your entire application landscape? Download our latest eGuide, 5 Ways to Improve Your Productivity with Digital Documents today.