Enhance Your Back-Office by Pairing Document Management & Workflow Automation

With 95% of senior executives planning to consolidate their tech vendors within the next year, it’s clear that many businesses are looking for ways to enhance, streamline, and elevate their existing back-office processes. 

Many legacy systems don’t pair well with each other, either due to outdated infrastructure or incompatible processing systems. To remain competitive in today’s digital landscape, businesses are under pressure to rely on vendors that can offer multiple solutions, providing them access to important data from a single, centralized platform.  

What does this look like? Pairing important back-office solutions like Document Management and Workflow Automation. By combining the power and efficiency of these two systems, businesses will experience a more cohesive, accurate, and efficient way of managing vital information from start to finish.  

In this blog, we’ll explore the challenges businesses without this dynamic duo face, as well as the impressive benefits that a partnership between Document Management and Workflows provides. 

The Hurdles Companies Face Without Integrated Document Management and Workflow Automation 

The challenges businesses face without these automation solutions vary depending on their current software and systems. Let’s look at three examples to better understand why not having these automated tools can hinder your business’s performance.  

Scenario 1: You Have No Document Management or Workflow Automation Solution 

Many businesses still rely on traditional ways of managing their important documents. This includes things like paper files and forms, rows of filing cabinets, manual processing procedures, and other time-consuming tasks. Similarly, all workflows are done by hand or have to be manually created to enable information to flow throughout your organization. This results in: 

• Disparate ways of filing forms, documents, and other information, leading to inaccurate record keeping.  

• Incompatible systems that communicate inefficiently, leading to confusion among staff members, lost files, and incorrect data.  

• Paper document related risks, like losing the sole physical copy or an entire filing system being damaged by a weather-related incident.  

Scenario 2: You Have a Document Management Automation Solution, But Not a Workflow System 

In this instance, your business already has a Document Management automation solution in place—but it doesn’t rely on Workflow automation. Even with the more efficient document storage, organization, and processing provided by this system, your staff members are likely still under strain. Why?  

Without Workflow Automation, they spend their time: 

• Building and maintaining web forms by hand. 

• Emailing forms back and forth, running the risk of inputting incorrect information or losing a completed form all together. 

• Dealing with multiple versions of a form, resulting in duplicated data. 

• Manually managing paper forms or fillable PDFs, adding time into their processing rates.  

Scenario 3: You Have Both Document Management and Workflow Automation Solutions—but They’re From Different Vendors  

So close, but still so far from full efficiency! Your business understands the importance and perks of automating your document management and workflow processes. However, you’ve chosen two systems from two different vendors—and they don’t play nicely together. This means your staff will be facing: 

• Tedious, repetitive shifting of data and information between the two systems, which can be incorrectly documented or paired.  

• Juggling multiple tabs and platforms, leading to fatigue and potentially burnout.  

• Significant security risks, as one system’s encryption procedures may not translate to the other software, leaving sensitive data vulnerable. 

The Benefits of Using DM and Workflow In Tandem 

Now that we’ve covered the headaches that come from lacking a paired Document Management and Workflow Automation solution, let’s examine the benefits of relying on this kind of back-office software.  

1) Improved Efficiency 

With automated Document Management and Workflows working together, your business will see an incredible boost in its efficiency. This can look like: 

• Ease of access across all of your processes, thanks to having multiple solutions in one, unified platform that works seamlessly together.  

• Anytime, anywhere access thanks to the platform’s cloud-based capabilities. 

• The elimination of redundancies and time-consuming, manual processes by leveraging rule-based workflows.  
• Effortless searching across all of your organization’s data, as the bottleneck of two separate systems have now been married into a single platform.  

2) Enhanced Security and Traceability 

Say goodbye to missing documents and inefficient workflows, and hello to the power of partnered, automated Document Management and Workflows. With this pairing, you’ll gain:  

• Better version control of documents and forms, allowing your staff to easily perform audits, track each piece’s history, and ensure no past versions are still in circulation. 

• Insight throughout the Document Management and Workflow solutions, enabling access to your repository of submitted, completed forms.  

• Enhanced security and compliance with built-in features that safeguard confidential information, prevent fraud, and can be adjusted for individual access permissions based on role.  

3) Scalability That Grows with Your Business 

The right duo of Document Management and Workflow automation isn’t static—it can grow and change with your business, whether you’re managing 500 documents and 10 workflows or 50,000 files and 250 workflows.  

• The flow of communication, data, and processes eliminate bottlenecks, enabling staff to complete their day-to-day tasks in a timely manner, regardless of your business’s size or complexity.  

• Collaboration strategies are completely transformed as automated operations reduce the risks of completed forms or approvals getting lost or stuck in inboxes.  

 4) Impressive Cost Savings 

Not only will your business be more efficient, but you’ll save money, too.  

• Paper-based expenses like ink, check printing and delivery, office space for filing cabinets, and more will all vanish.  

• With both solutions operating out of the same platform, maintenance, license, and server fees are consolidated.  

• As manual processes give way to their automated counterparts, your ROI and cash flow will see a significant boost from improved operational efficiency.  

For a real-life look at what the pairing of Document Management and Workflow automation can do for an organization, check out our case study on MetroTex Association of REALTORS.  

Automated Document Management and Workflow Solutions: A Match Made in Heaven 

Now that you’ve seen what the pairing of Document Management and Workflow Automation can do for a business’s bottom line, performance, and security efforts, why waste any more time on outdated, inefficient back-office processes? 

Schedule a demo with one of our automation experts today to learn more about how our platform combines document management and workflows for impressive, accurate information collection, management, and processing.