Integrated Document Managment Companies of America. Contact the member in your area.

Savings Associated with Integrated Document Management

The savings associated with an Integrated Document Management system are determined on a case by case basis.  You may want to call the Integrated Document Management Professional in your area for an overall review of your systems and procedures. However, there are some generalities about cost savings.

The more documents you integrate into a Document Management System, the more you automate and the more electronic data extraction reduces the need to re-type data into various systems, the quicker the payback for this solution.  Others have enjoyed significant savings by integrating the invoicing process in order to take discounts.  Others have commented that automatically cross checking purchase order pricing with the prices on the invoices can be an immediate cost savings.

An example of cost savings associated with integrating documents from a number of processes is product ordering.  Some of these "documents" were originally paper documents which were scanned and had data extracted from them.  Other docuements are purely electronic data and never printed. A purchase order is created and sent to the supplier.  The supplier invoices the company and ships the goods.  When the goods arrive, a bill of lading shows what is delivered.  Then the data is entered into various systems such as Accounts Payable, Inventory Control, Job Costing, Manufacturing Costing.

Integrated Document Management.  The purchase order is electronically conveyed to a Document Management System.  When the invoice comes in, it is scanned and that data is extracted and put in the work process basket associated with the purchase order.  When the goods arrive, the bill of lading is also scanned and data extracted to put in the work process basket.  Then the data can be cross verified to validate the proper pricing, quantities, model numbers, etc.  The data can then be electronically conveyed to the accounts payable system, inventory control system, manufacturing system, etc.

Typical Motivation for Integrated Document Management Solutions

 Typical Integrated Document Management, Data Extraction and Business Process Automation prospects have recently asked themselves more than one of the following questions. 

• Do you spend too much time re-entering data into various systems? 
• Do some of your documents actually get lost?
• Do you sometimes overpay invoices versus the price you agreed to on your purchase order? 
• Do you sometimes accept goods that are not "exactly" what you ordered?
• Do you wish you could take discounts on invoices, but can't process them fast enough?

• Do you need more immediate access to files?
• Is the amount of time it takes to retrieve a file from the file room simply too long?  
• Do you need instant access to the files?  Is immediate customer service becoming extremely important? 
• Are you running out of space for the hard copy files? 
• Are you looking at the costs of special filing systems, such as rolling files? 
• Are you looking at the costs of acquiring more office space for file storage? 
• Do you feel a need to reduce your overall costs associated with storing, retrieving, refilling and the safety and security of your documents?
• If you had a disaster such as a hurricane, flood or fire, are your current documents protected?

Besides typical costs savings associated with Integrated Document Management, which are important, there are other benefits which may be more important to a company or institution than cost savings.  Those benefits revolve around implementing a "systems" or "process" approach to your entity. 

EMPLOYEE TRAINING:  If the paper work data is handled in a systematic and automatic basis based on a set of rules you set up, then training new people becomes much easier.  You have a blue print of what is happening and there is much less chance that a particular manager or new employee will impose their own opinions and outlook on a system, which will harm your business in the long run.

GROWTH:  Once the Integrated Document Management system has made your business processes are systematic and automated, the growth of  a business becomes much more manageable.  These Document Management systems are scalable.  The idea of Intrgrating Documents from many different processes can be found in the biggest companies such as Burger King, Pepsi, Xerox, etc.  There are many books that promote having systematic business processes as the biggest single factor in allowing a company to grow.