Posted by Melanie Aizer on Tue, Aug 24, 2010 @ 10:44 AM
Online version
http://www.worldleasingnews.com/article.aspx?pid=cNV6VsCapAQ=&ptype=YrItVniimrc
A lot of noise has been made in the document management world about how to decide what documents get the “document management treatment.” In other words, what documents will we take the time to process through, or into the document management system and which ones will we exclude. This is a very outdated way of thinking of document management, and it simply needs to change.
The problem with having to decide what is going to go into your document management system before you begin is that it creates a commitment that you will have to live with for a very long time. Inevitably you will have documents in your system that you will never access again, others that you access all of the time and another group that you wish you had put into the system but that you didn’t. The early commitment that you make in document management is based on an unreasonable premise; I know what documents are going to be important to me in the future.
The ever changing environments of business, government regulation, compliance and the global economy all work against us to know what documents will be important in the future and which will be obsolete tomorrow. The solution is simple – keep everything.
Document Management Software
The challenge for document management software, and document management systems, is the overhead most of them require in order to get documents into them in a usable format. Scanning documents is labor intensive, requires hardware and frankly is a horrible job to punish any employee with. Because scanning documents into a document management system is so painful, document management providers suggest outsourcing (shipping your documents to lower labor communities), crowd-sourcing (making everyone in the company do their part), and simple brute force (relegate the job to the lowest cost internal people).
The issues with these approaches are obvious.
Shipping documents to other people in other facilities is not cost efficient. In addition, it opens up the risk that documents will be misplaced, private documents may be compromised, or that documents will be unavailable when they are needed because they are neither on-site nor have they made it into the document management software yet. Crowd-sourcing is certainly the most efficient however it requires everyone to participate in the same way as we ask people to clean-up after themselves in the lunch room or at the coffee station. If this is going really well for you then you might have a shot. See all of the problems described above to better understand the issues around brute force.
For a document management system to be effective, using the document management software has to be more convenient than not using the document management software. This is a pretty simple concept that we witness in change management all the time. If you want people to change, create a solution that is more convenient – easy. Ok, maybe it sounds easy, but how do you do it?
Document Management Systems
The solution for creating a document management solution that is going to work for your organization, and be MORE convenient than not using document management is to move ahead on the workflow process chain. Every document follows a process of creation, completion, delivery and storage, with the potential for several iterations occurring during the completion and delivery stages as well as reversals of that order. If your document management system captures every document automatically earlier in the process, like in the creation, completion or delivery stages, then you eliminate the thought and effort required to put the documents into document management at storage.
To win with document management the solution is simple – capture documents as they completed, not just when they are stored.
Mike Gardner is CEO of Recombo Inc.
Posted by Melanie Aizer on Fri, Jun 04, 2010 @ 05:43 PM
Paper consumption is costly to the environment; it makes up the largest component of solid waste by weight. In the U.S. alone, over 40% of municipal solid waste is paper – about 71.8 million tons each year; enough to build a 12-foot high wall from New York to California.
The process of producing paper requires huge amounts of water and electricity. To make paper white, paper is bleached; the most common bleaching agent is chlorine that can find its way into our waterways. The plastic from toner cartridges discarded into landfills takes more than 1000 years to decompose.
Ninety five percent of business information is still stored on paper…There are some options for organizations that wish to make environmentally friendlier choices:
Recycle your paper. Recycling 1 short ton (0.91 t) of paper saves:
*17 mature trees
*7 thousand US gallons (26 m3) of water
*3 cubic yards (2.3 m3) of landfill space
*2 barrels of oil (84 US gal or 320 l)
*4,100 kilowatt-hours (15 GJ) of electricity — enough energy to power the average American home for six months (Wikipedia).
Choose totally chlorine-free (TCF) paper. This is environmentally preferable to “elementally chlorine-free” (ECF) paper, which is bleached with chlorine derivatives that still produce toxic chlorinated compounds. This website contains information on purchasing various types and quantities of environmentally friendly paper.
Recycle toner cartridges. Many retailers who sell toner may offer a trade-in value for a new one. There are also many websites that offer cash for used cartridges, search for keyword “recycle toner cartridges” to learn more.
Reduce your use of paper. The most environmentally sound decision is to use less paper. Digital document workflow technology offers the opportunity to drive costs down and increase productivity while making a lighter environmental impact.
Posted by Melanie Aizer on Fri, Jun 04, 2010 @ 05:37 PM
Part 1: Measure Your Data — Make the Right DecisionsThis topic of
automating business process with digital technology is obviously too large to be comprehensive in just one entry.
Therefore, I’m going to start by picking apart this topic, bit by bit, and I’m going to start with looking at the question of “
why” before I go to deep into the “
how”.
When we think about the automation of business processes, we usually jump to dreamy concepts like competitive advantage, service differentiation, or streamlining back-office efficiencies. But I think we miss the more obvious – providing a source of data measurement.
Our organizations are rich with completely unmeasured processes. A good example of this is service level commitments, often called SLA’s or Service Level Agreements. Regardless of whether or not we decide to publish our business processing commitments, we all set them. We tell our staff to approve client credit applications in fewer than 10 hours from the time of receipt, or ask our accounts payable people to process invoices in under a day.
In my years of working with companies, originally as an analyst looking at just these types of problems, the process was always the same – first we had to find the data.
One of the greatest arguments for automating business processes with digital technology is so that you have a consistent and reliable source of data. In the right hands, this data can tell you where you are over or under staffed, how you are doing on customer commitments, where your other systems are letting you down, or where you may have an opportunity to really build one of those service differentiators that will one day become a competitive advantage.
Without intelligent automation you either have to go through herculean efforts every time you want to measure a function, which means you won’t watch it all the time, or you simply guess where your organization needs to put its attention.
In the worst case, leaders who are struggling to find data simply give up and start making decisions in absence of data. As a great business leader friend of mine always says, “prescription without diagnosis is malpractice”. He’s right, and having no data is no excuse for making off-the-cuff changes to your business.
Go get the data, and do it right.
Posted by Melanie Aizer on Fri, Jun 04, 2010 @ 05:34 PM
How to increase insurance sales by going paperless – Lessons learned from insurance brokers.
Caller: “Hi, I’m looking to purchase home insurance.”
Agent: “No problem, I’m sending you a quote right away. Just print it, sign it and fax it back.”
In this post I would like to highlight a critical, strategic, benefit from adopting paperless processes – an increase in revenue and sales.
In the past year I have been working with several large and medium-sized insurance brokers who were looking to improve their bottom line through process automation. They had each invested in sophisticated software for quote generation and document management, and yet, these brokers were faced with a similar problem: how to convert more QUOTES to DEALS. They were losing potential clients after delivering a quote to the client, often after the client had agreed to purchase the product.
An analysis of their existing sales process showed that, despite their high level of internal automation, the sales transaction itself was paper based – prospects were asked to print, complete, and return forms and documents.
This paper based process made the sales transaction longer. An average insurance transaction would take 4-5 days to complete (from the time the prospects verbal acceptance was obtained). The prospect would not have access to a fax; they would send the documents by mail; they would forget about them altogether, and so on.
A longer transaction meant that prospects had more time seeking quotes from other brokers, especially ones that they could meet face-to-face as a walk-in, and conclude their business on the spot.
The insurance broker/agent was at a disadvantage once they had delivered the quote or the documents to the prospect. They had no control over the transaction, no visibility, and no clear understanding of when (or if) the transaction will close.
After implementation these brokers were able to conclude a sales transaction in 45 minutes. This included document presentation to the client, obtaining their electronic signature and any supporting information they would need to provide, and forwarding the signed document to their back-office system.
Agents were able to conclude a transaction while they have a prospect on the phone, controlling the situation and guiding them through the document completion process. All the client needed was an Internet browser and email access.
The result was a decline in the abandoned deals rate our clients experienced. To put this in perspective – a 30% decline in abandoned deals translates to tens of thousands of dollars per month in additional revenue. If they were quoting 500 deals a month, and closing 300, at an average deal size of $700, the additional deals closed by going paperless translates to 30% x 200 x $700 = $42,000/month in additional revenue.
Impressive.
So, what are the lessons we learned from our insurance clients?
(a) Time kills deals. The longer it takes to complete a deal, the higher the abandonment rate is.
(b) Control over the sales process is critical. If you leave it to the client, you may never see them again.
(c) By going paperless you could close business while you have a client engaged on the phone. Rather than deliver quotes you could be closing deals.
Going paperless has a direct (and significant) impact on the bottom line, enabling you to generate more revenue by making it easier for your clients to do business with you. Add to that the inherent cost savings of paperless transactions and the environmental benefits, and you truly benefit across the board.
Guest post written by Oren Friedman. Oren works with TELUS Communications to deliver TELUS Secure Contracts (a branded version of Recombo’s Agreement Express to businesses across Canada.)
Posted by Melanie Aizer on Fri, Jun 04, 2010 @ 05:32 PM
Out of the Red and into the Green: Transitioning Your Company from Paper to Paperless
According to IDC, US companies spend $25 to $35 billion processing, filing, storing and retrieving paper. Management of documents over their life cycle pushes that figure up to $100 billion a year.
Coopers and Lybrand released a study that showed that the average office:
• Makes 19 copies of each document;
• Spends $250 recreating each lost document;
• Spends $20 on labor for filing each document;
• Loses 1 out of 20 documents;
• Spends $120 searching for every misfiled document; and
• Spends $25,000 to fill a 4-drawer file cabinet and $2,000 annually to maintain it!
Federal laws combined with business needs have finally made digital signatures a legal and valid alternative to traditional pen and paper-based contracts. Step back for a minute and analyze the traditional business process. You’ve got a contract that needs to get from London to Cincinnati tomorrow. After you print it, sign it and insert it into the fax machine or wait for the courier, consider a few questions:
• How do you know the status of your contract?
• How do you know your end recipient or customer is sensitive to your timeline?
Let’s assume the contract is returned by the deadline. What do you do with it now?
• Enter the data into back office systems?
• Scan it, file it and hope you can find it again?
At the end of this time, energy and cost-consuming process, how much did this all cost? Once you receive the ‘completed’ document, keep your fingers crossed that there aren’t any legal, audit, critical information or signatures missing, because when there are holes in your document trail the costs of settlement, litigation and lost goodwill can be enormous.
The obvious environmental and cost savings in electronic agreement and digital signature products are many: Whether it’s the overall reduction of a company’s carbon footprint, the end of paper storage or the courier costs of shipping and processing paper around the world, more and more companies are seeing green initiatives as imperative.
Electronic agreements and digital signatures are no longer the future; they are here and ready to ease the burden on many aspects of business communication. If change is on your radar screen, the key is to make it scalable, roll it out one business unit at a time and choose a system that doesn’t require a monolithic ‘big bang’ implementation.
The ability to start and end digital with electronic agreements and digital signatures allows organizations to minimize risk, eliminate mail, fax and courier, reduce administration costs and streamline processes.
At the end of the day, switching to a system that utilizes the company’s existing IT infrastructure and harnesses the power of interactivity will save even more money because most digital signature platforms are scalable and flexible. Isn’t that what the future of technology is all about?
As companies are expected to do more with fewer resources, it’s time to consider a solution that doesn’t re-invent the wheel, but only refines it. Add to that the prospect of being green and reducing your overall carbon footprint and you’ve made the wheel turn a lot more efficiently.
The time is now to start digital and end digital.
Posted by Reed Clayton
Posted by Melanie Aizer on Fri, Jun 04, 2010 @ 05:28 PM
In this blog we will discuss topics around eliminating paper from our office environment. There will be a number of contributing authors to our blog but final editing will always be done by the CEO of Recombo, Mike Gardner. Mike is a successful entrepreneur and a visionary with deep experience in the financial sector. And he has been an expert in sustainable business practices long before there was even a hint that business needed to place the planet on a par with profit.
We hope you enjoy our articles. Please sign up and help us make this the most important conversation about eliminating paper from our organizations.
Posted by Melanie Aizer on Fri, Jun 04, 2010 @ 04:53 PM
It was American Ben Franklin who is credited for first calling out the relationship between Liberty and Security, and his sentiments apply as much to business documents as they do to our society.
The challenge for business is that our businesses benefit from open and easy access to information, but we have a responsibility to our customers to ensure that we take appropriate measures to protect their personal information. It is this balance between the efficiencies companies can gain by openly sharing information with all employees (liberty) and the obligation to protect information (security) that is a major short coming of paper based agreement processes.
Take for example the simple situation of an application process that requires credit card information to pass from the applicant to the company. It is likely that the individual’s application contains a lot of information that must be shared with a variety of people within the organization.
This may include the sales representative who solicited the application in the first place, the customer service agent who is confirming that the application has been received and the application adjudicator who is going to process and approve the individual’s request.
To make this process run efficiently for the applicant the company is best to make the application widely available so any of their employees can quickly and easily put their fingers on the document. The problem of course is that in order to allow efficient access to the application, the company has to compromise the security of the credit card number. Even though it is likely only one person (the person processing the payment) in the organization actually needs access to the credit card information, everyone who can access the document compromises the company’s consumer obligation to protect their sensitive personal information.
This of course isn’t limited to Credit Card information. Internal comments, patient history, sexual history or orientation and a limitless number of other bits of information are equally as important to the consumer as their credit card information. Protecting all of this information is critical and providing the liberty to access the document is essential.
This is exactly where enterprise class Paperless Agreement Management platforms shine. These platforms can protect and control access to individual components of information within a document, without having to deny access to the entire thing. Liberty and Security, another reason why paper’s time has come to end for business.