Getting Clarity on Document Automation

Every organization generates documents, which could run into hundreds or thousands per day. From developing sales quotations, policy, and procedure documents, to employment or legal contracts, the information contained in these documents is critical to the business.

Most documents have repetitive text and variable content that needs to be appropriately tailored. Document automation may make even the most complicated corporate documents easier to create, yet many businesses are unsure how it works. Let us look at some misleading notions that prevent organizations from adopting automation.

Our manual document processes work

Companies learn coping and work-around strategies to put up with legacy systems, a jumble of broken procedures, bypassed controls, and outdated boilerplates. Contracts, for example, produced through these all-too-common practices often expose businesses to penalties and legal liabilities. To reduce risk exposure, adopting document preparation standards offers a unified mechanism to enforce policies. However, when rules and procedures aren’t implemented through technology systems, they are easy to get around — either intentionally or unintentionally. Unbelievably, most businesses have better controls in place for purchasing office supplies than they do for creating legally binding documents.

A lack of control at the beginning of the document management process exposes businesses to danger. One erroneous clause could result in an avoidable crisis, and insufficient or non-existent document automation increases the likelihood of this happening. There are two ways in which businesses respond to this threat. Those that are serious about reducing risk will improve their document preparation on the front end. Those who are not serious about lowering their exposure create more documents and processes to maintain plausible deniability if something goes wrong, which happens frequently.

Automation is too complicated and expensive

Document automation software can easily help produce documents by including wizard-driven forms and templates to eliminate the need to copy and paste. Automation features allow accessing of external data sources and repositories to provide text input for document creation. And, because the data originates from live sources it is always up to date, no matter how complicated the data or the document.

eForms and document automation solutions are investments and should not be seen as an expense in improving enterprise-wide operations. Furthermore, the time it takes to print, publish, complete, and process a single document can be easily tracked. When the financial weight of paper is multiplied over an entire organization combined with manual human resource efforts, it results in a major financial drain and a decline in productivity. By relying on document automation, companies can do more with less.

Automation is just another term for document management

Document automation is frequently confused with document management software. Document management software is not intended to assist businesses in avoiding contract formation issues. Its goal is to keep a completed document’s integrity by limiting access, editing privileges, and keeping track of who reviews, alters, and approves it.

But when a document management system contains automation functionality, it helps structure the process around creating documents. These features have supplanted word processors as the principal tool for document creation. It is a significant improvement in the document management process. The company cannot enforce business regulations using word processors because it is entirely manual and takes place external to the document generating process. Organizations can declare and enforce their business standards right at the start of the process with document automation tools that exist within a document management system.

The Best of Both Worlds

By automating the creation and approval of documents, businesses can obtain further efficiencies and maximize their resources. KRIS Document Management System (DMS) ensures documents are generated with consistency to adhere to all company requirements. By better understanding automated document generation and its advantages, you can realize lower maintenance and training expenses while maintaining the organization’s ability to monetize intellectual property and increase employee productivity.