Resources to help you ensure critical, data-driven operations continue in an uncertain landscape
We talk about the value of transparency in mission-critical, essential and transactional work processes every day in the content services industry, and it has never been a more imperative conversation than right now.
In the past two months, the speed at which organizations around the world have had to temporarily shutter offices and relocate administrative operations to at-home locations instead of within their facilities revealed an instant, clear view into which manual processes are working with a remote workforce and which are not viable.
“Fully or partially manual processes only function when workers and physical files are located in the same place,” according to a recent Forrester report. “That’s why millions of people working from home has resulted in complete breakdowns of key operations for enterprises that depend on manual processes. Paper-based, co-located processes – still prevalent in many organizations – are the most critical to automate. These are the business processes most likely to break when it’s no longer possible to simply pass a folder to the person at the next desk.”
Many organizations have been on the path to digital transformation for years now, implementing digital instead of paper-based processes in key areas of the organization to enable remote work to happen. But not for every business area, and not for nearly an entire workforce.
Disruption of the best laid plans
Even the best project plans and roadmaps for enabling a digital workforce as a long-term strategy were disrupted by this year’s immediate need to have remote workforces. It’s thrown off the entire way many organizations run, let alone the prioritized plans that were in place for this year.
I should share that I have always been a planner. And this time has been an interesting journey for me, like most of us, who have a hard time letting go of knowing what to expect in the coming weeks and months. Priorities I had two months ago have completely changed as I’ve moved to my home office with my toddler co-worker (and another one on the way!) and my husband working in the next room from me.
Our workplace priorities are moving and changing instantaneously. Where to focus our efforts to keep our family, employees, and customers safe — and help our customers succeed with their new way of doing mission-critical work – is a real-time, unprecedented challenge. When I talk to customers and our consultants here at Hyland, this theme echoes in the conversations, sounding louder and more prevalent with each passing day.
How do we know what to expect in the coming months?
How long is our business going to be disrupted?
What can we do now to maintain business continuity, let alone accelerate it?
How do we make sure that people like me today at home can access what I need to keep my business operations in order?
Well, a good start is to take advantage of capabilities you have in place. Those who have started their content services journey in key areas of the business are well-positioned to accelerate plans for digital workflows.
This, for all intents and purposes, will enable your administrative workers to have the same capabilities they had when they were handing off folders to each other in the office. But we all know, they won’t have the same capabilities. They will have far more efficient, secure and enduring strengths that enable them to provide the best service to their customers, constituents, patients, students and vendors and partners.
Capture mission-critical documents and take advantage of the low-code platform you have in place
“What technologies do you use to manage and automate business processes within your organization?” the Forrester report asked.
More than 70% of organizations answered that they still have paper-based process dependencies.
If your organization falls into that category, it’s likely that your planned content services initiatives need to accelerate and pivot to accommodate today’s realities – one of which is instituting the capture of mission critical documents, forms and other pieces of content entering your organization in various ways.
The Forrester report also states, “If you’ve got a low-code, DPA, or CWM platform, apply it aggressively now.”
Because low-code platforms require minimal manual coding and provide automated, data-driven workflows and interoperability with critical business systems, they promote secure agility to respond rapidly to evolving business needs — more valuable than ever with today’s remote workforces and processes that need to carry on. But you still need to get the physical documents into your content services platform in order to take advantage of the benefits.
What do you do if the volumes of documents you need to scan into your system have grown exponentially in the last two months? Or you have workers who would have scanned incoming documents now at home, while the files are at the office?
The challenges and urgent needs are different in insurance than manufacturing or healthcare, but the need to keep these processes moving is quite similar. Whether:
- Addressing the bottleneck in the mail room
- Keeping up with the daily processing of AP invoices
- Managing the OCR or validation of claims
- Processing bills of lading to ensure supply chains remain intact
- Indexing medical records to ensure records remain current and promote remote interoperability for improved patient care
- Or countless other essential processes
It’s all about ensuring your employees have secure access – anytime, from anywhere – to the crucial information they need to perform their jobs as effectively as possible.
It’s all critical.
If you don’t have the resources to keep up with an influx of document volumes, or your remote workforce cannot efficiently access documents entering the organization, we can help. Our Imaging Services enable you to consistently and timely scan, import and index large volumes of documents and make them instantly available to your users, business systems and processes.
Get the capacity to scale scanning operations up and down as necessary
We can help with any range of scanning and indexing needs you currently have.
Whether you have a backlog of documents you acquired in the first weeks and months of this current environment or you need ongoing support of incoming documents in a certain business area for the time being, our Imaging Services group can help. We also provide full mailroom processing for as long as necessary that includes rules and exceptions for documents not requiring capture, like junk mail.
Our teams securely transport your documents from a PO Box, from your sites or through the courier service you require. We scan and index documents according to your business, security and retention rules and we can store, return or destroy them once imported into your content services platform.
Control the things you can, so you can focus on the quickly evolving landscape
Even when workforces start returning to the office, logistics are going to be different than before. Physical space will be at a premium, and social distancing is changing the way every organization operates.
You may find that it is more valuable to use on-site real estate for other critical business areas, rather than processing paper. Or you may find that staff members who have provided indexing in the past have higher value service tasks they could be performing.
The most important thing is to ensure your critical business data is available to those who need it, when they need it, so business can continue and you can provide the best customer experiences.
Crisis or not, critical business functions need to be in motion
As I pivot from my most important job, being a mother, to my other job, helping customers focus on a critical step toward a more digital workplace, there is one constant that comes up in discovery conversations.
“Do you have the resources to handle your current scanning needs?”
It’s that simple.
And if you don’t, we can help.
Find the peace of mind for this critical work by trusting our highly specialized teams who have a commitment to security, service and quality. They ensure your documents move into your business solutions quickly and are available to everyone who needs them, regardless of where in the world they are.
By quickly finding the information they need instead of worrying about scanning it into the system, your employees are free to focus on what matters most for your organization.
