Regardless of the industry, Electronic Document Management can help businesses meet deadlines and contractual obligations.
As I move forward day to day, I notice trends developing as EDM (Electronic Document Management) becomes more prevalent in the market. I was talking with the President of Fishers this morning, and as we reviewed the past several implementations and those in the pipeline, I noticed a commonality that had not really been as obvious to me. The revelation was that regardless of the industry, be it a service organization, a healthcare provider, or a manufacturer, there was the common theme of deadlines and contractual obligations.
Here are a couple of examples:
1. A healthcare services provider has a contract with the state. There are many metrics that they track, but the most difficult to quantify or measure is their ability to hit the contractual obligations they have to process requests in the required amount of time. If they don’t process in 24 or 48 hours, depending on the scenario, they are out of compliance. Too many of these and the contract with the state could be in jeopardy.
2. I met with a manufacturer, who like many manufacturers, has primary vendors who they order from. Since they do a large amount of business with them, they have negotiated terms which state if they pay their bill to the within 10 days they receive a 2% discount on the invoice. They do several million dollars per year with this vendor. So the dollar amount is not insignificant. They are fairly sure that they capture these discounts, but have yet to find a way to ensure that they are.
3. An engineering company sells their reports to their customers. The industry standard is a 48 hour turnaround time for published reports. They know that they don’t always hit this goal. The potential consequence is that they could lose customers, but again don’t have good methods to track the process or the individuals.
4. A real estate agency has, per the state, a set number of hours to review documents submitted by an agent. Being out of compliance or being unable to prove compliance can result in some serious fines.
In each scenario, we have been able to import, classify, and track the appropriate documents. Since the documents are in an EDM system, we can capture every action, and set alerts if a timeline is getting tight. This ensures that nothing gets missed sitting on someone’s desk. Even if an individual is traveling, there are a number of ways to notify that person that their action is required, including e-mail notifications.
We all have deadlines that we are trying to hit. With EDM tracking your paperwork no longer needs to be a concern.