Documents are like the container ships of the ocean, carving their way along international shipping lanes. They carry valuable goods (data) between important destinations. This critical data often comes in a wide variety of forms: from purchase orders to invoices, from patient admission forms to personal identification. The data that is transported is often fresh and vital to the daily operations of the business. However, there’s about an 80% chance that this valuable data is also unstructured, making it inaccessible.
Similar to container handlers in an outdated port, there are employees who are tasked with manually processing these documents. Clever ports (and businesses), however, know that there is a better way: they’ve automated the sorting of the containers, the unpacking of the containers, the sorting of the products inside and the transportation of those products to destinations where they will be put to good use. Innovative technology can eliminate slow, laborious tasks that waste precious time, stop the drain on company resources and accelerate non-differentiating tasks.
CIOs are increasingly responsible for the modernisation of entire businesses or government departments. According to an IDG report, 2020 State of the CIO, this role is taking on a more strategic focus. Almost 90% of CIOs responded that they are increasingly involved in leading digital transformation initiatives compared to their counterparts. They are also aligning with other lines of business initiatives that will drive the most IT investment in 2020: increasing operational efficiency and improving customer experience.
Here are the questions that CIOs need to be asking when it comes to digital transformation and documents:
- How much money could our company make or save by unlocking unstructured data in documents?
- How much does it cost our company to manually sort and process documents each year? Could we use software to automate and reduce this cost?
- How many people in our teams are performing data entry and document handling tasks? How many people could we free up to focus on more value-add tasks?
- Are there decentralized locations or departments that duplicate resources, causing extra work, risk and delays?
- Could we improve employee satisfaction and retention by reducing the manual tasks associated with document handling?
- How many more documents per hour, day, month and year could we process if we used modern data acquisition software?
- What valuable information resides in the documents our company sends and receives every day that could be captured and leveraged by other parts of our enterprise to improve our understanding of our financial position, increase customer satisfaction and help us make better business decisions?
- How can we reduce our risk and improve our compliance by reducing the errors inherent in document handling?
- What if we could automate the matching of invoices with purchase orders automatically instead of doing this manually? How much time would that save us? Could we negotiate discounts and better payment terms with our suppliers if we could pay our bills earlier?
- How could we efficiently ingest valuable data from documents into our ERP, CRM and HCM (Human Capital Management) apps?
- What if there was a better way of managing all the documents in our enterprise? What if our competitors found it before we did?
If you would like to learn more about using modern, AI-based technology to generate efficiency, accuracy and productivity, contact us here.
