Decrease Unnecessary Spending With Enterprise Content Management and Automation
Staying competitive is a challenge for every business in today’s business climate. Innovation is at an all-time high, and if you fail to keep up with the trends sweeping your industry, you could find yourself at a significant disadvantage. Fortunately, there are two ways to increase your bottom line:
- Generate More Revenue: This can be a challenge. Creating new pipeline typically requires a heavy input of company resources. You need to invest in training salespeople, marketing your product or services, and closing deals at a rate that supports your expenses.
- Decrease Unnecessary Spending: On the other hand, you can eliminate (or at the very least reduce) the types of unnecessary expenses that most businesses are completely unaware of. By doing so, you can free up capital to spend how you see fit or save for a rainy day.
In this article, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Automation experts at IntelliChief will cover the types of unprecedented cost savings that can be achieved when your company is running at peak efficiency.
Say Goodbye (and Good Riddance) to Paper
Paper and its related expenses are one of the biggest spending items for a company. Enterprise Content Management greatly decreases costs due to printing, faxing, storing, and otherwise using paper for all types of business transactions.
Replace Costly Physical Storage With Consolidated Digital Storage
Storage is an expense many companies incur for keeping paper documents. If a manual system requires the retention of paper documents, such as accounting records, for a certain number of years, the cost of doing business can rise sharply. These expenses only grow as more physical storage is required, as does the cost of retrieving these documents. ECM eliminates costly storage and consolidates all documents within your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system with everything available at the press of a key.
Improve Working Conditions for Your Valued Employees
Labor is one of the largest expenses in most companies. Making copies, manually routing documents, and hunting for lost paper items is time-consuming, inefficient, and repetitive. Companies that can pass of menial tasks to automation tend to have happier employees. These employees are empowered by the use of electronic tools to search for information and complete customer service tasks with ease. Documents move through an electronic workflow system so employees make decisions quickly. Losing information is no longer a costly problem. Employees can collaborate to resolve problems and issues directly from their PC or mobile devices, in any location, working together at the same time for speedy resolution.
Bolster Confidence Among Your Customers
With a manual system, companies need to keep constant track of purchase orders, requisitions, orders, and invoices. Not only is it time-consuming but it also leads to important items falling through the cracks. ECM and Automation improve customer relations because it shortens the time to find information, produces invoices faster, and keeps employees updated for faster turnaround with vendors and customers. It frees up employees to go where they are needed, rather than continuously handling paper to get business done.
You can still receive Purchase Orders, Requisitions, and Orders how yo always have, whether it is a fax, postal mail, email, or Web; however, once these documents enter your system, they will be accessible on-demand whenever and wherever they are required.
Overhaul Accounts Payable for Immense Savings
With Enterprise Content Management, any authorized employee can gain immediate access to all Accounts Payable documents – purchase orders, acknowledgments, receiving documents, invoices, and checks.
A major advantage of using ECM is avoiding lost or missing documents and the costs incurred with a lost document — costing an average of $500 per document to replace. Other major savings by going paperless with Accounts Payable documents include lower costs for printing, postage, faxing, special delivery, and storage.
Electronically managing the Accounts Payable has many benefits:
- Saving money by taking better advantage of vendor discounts
- Saving money by using less equipment, furniture, and supplies
- Saving money and time with immediate access to all Accounts Payable documents
- Saving time with faster research, better organization, cross filing and matching documents
- Saving time for employees because of higher accuracy, avoiding manual keying errors, and
- Utilizing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for quick, accurate search and retrieval of electronic documents
It’s also worth noting that these benefits are largely transferrable to other departments, including Accounts Receivable, Order Entry, and more.
Superior Compliance and Security…Simplified
Regulatory compliance for Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA requires strong security and specific legal mandates for companies. They have to consider external government regulations and internal security policies as a critical part of doing business. With paperless process management, time limits for retaining documents are easily established. When documents are no longer needed, they can easily be purged according to strict time controls to limit any liability issues.
An Enterprise Content Management system provides security against unauthorized access as well as the accidental or deliberate loss of records. Documents are automatically stored according to company-designed rules and regulations.
Stay Safe With Industry-Leading Disaster Recovery Services
The Gartner Group concludes that two out of five organizations that experience a disaster go out of business within five years. The principal reason: loss of documentation critical to a businesses’ daily function. A paperless process management solution has built-in backup and recovery capabilities in the event of a disaster.
All business processes can be integrated into a Disaster Recovery Plan with paperless process management. All documents can be retrieved as needed from any location.
