Take Control of Your Enterprise Information

April 16, 2018

By Mark Brousseau, Analyst and Researcher in Business Process Automation, Brousseau & Associates

Companies of all sizes are managing more information than ever. By 2020 businesses will be managing 50 times the amount of information, IDC predicts. At the same time, 37 percent of organizations surveyed by AIIM report that their offices are “piled high” with paper. 19 percent of organizations report that the volume of paper flowing through their processes is increasing.

Growing data volumes combined with stubbornly high paper volumes and the proliferation of document channels is ratcheting up the challenge of effectively managing information. Effectively managing operations, cash and security and compliance risks requires organizations to take control of their enterprise information.

It all starts with effectively managing the growing number of ways that documents can enter an organization:

Paper
E-mail
Fax
MFP
Web
Shared services center
SharePoint / Box
BPO

Contracts, orders, invoices, shipping documents, correspondence, applications or any other structured or unstructured business document must be digitized and aggregated into a single platform.

Organizations must then have a way to automatically classify documents to eliminate manual data entry, digitize workflows, reduce downstream exceptions, and seamlessly post information directly into any system of record (such as an ERP, CRM or ECM) – and/or transfer information to a records management application. Data from documents should be extracted automatically to reduce manual data entry and the opportunity for errors.

And organizations need transaction processing capabilities to automate business applications such as:

Digital mailroom
Procurement
Accounts payable
Accounts receivable
Expense management

Finally, gaining control of enterprise information requires configurable dashboards that enable users to view all images and data, gain real-time visibility into workflows and trends, and search and export information for better control over: