When it comes to helping customers enhancing their workflow, what better place to start than with a document management solution? Workflow and document management are practically synonymous and office technology and imaging solutions dealers have an array of choices to move customers from cumbersome manual processes to more efficient electronic processes. Even customers who have implemented some sort of digital process into their workflow have found there’s sometimes a better way. To get a better idea of what organizations are looking to achieve with a workflow solution we spoke with workflow experts at two dealerships who shared their experiences selling, implementing, and servicing document management-based workflow solutions.
Commonwealth Digital Office Solutions (COMDOS) in Sterling, VA has been selling Square9’s SmartSearch and SmartCapture going on three years now. It’s the ideal product for its customers, including various associations based in the DC area who are looking for ways to improve their workflows and routing.
“It’s very flexible, user friendly, and doesn’t require an engineering degree to set these workflows up,” noted Robert Feinstein, senior solutions manager for COMDOS. “It’s really easy on the customer side so they can set up their own workflow. We usually start it and they can often add on to it themselves.”
One of COMDOS’s customers was looking for a way to improve the way invoices were routed through the organization. After sitting down with the customer and getting a clear understanding of how they were doing it now, the solution was Square9. The invoices originated in the accounting department who then sent them off to each department head to get approved. Often, those approvals took as much as 30 days.
“We were able to automate that process and now they get those invoices back much faster and they no longer have to pay late fees,” explained Feinstein. “It quickly paid for itself.”
While ROI varies from customer to customer depending on what they’re automating, Feinstein reported that some organizations see an ROI in as quickly as 90 days while others may have to wait 18 months. “It depends on the volume and what we’re trying to solve for the customer,” he said.
COMDOS sells a few other document management programs and they’re all different in how they do things. What he likes best about Square9 and its SmartCapture scanning solution, which he calls ‘front-end capturing,’ is that it includes many features out of the box such as OCR, barcode recognition, zonal OCR, capture workflow, and other advanced capture capabilities whereas competitive products are more open and require third-party products to provide the same features.
“If they don’t have any third party products such as NSi AutoStore, Hyland OCR for AnhyDoc, or PSIGEN Capture, Square9 is perfect because it gives them everything they need, but if they’re already using a third-party product, the other product fits in really well because it can tie into it that solution.”
Another customer, a large association, was having problems with its American Express bill. “It was over 50 pages and they line item everything out and it goes to all the different department heads and speakers that they use,” noted Feinstein. “Now, with the ability to pull the invoice in they can send it out to each of those departments and automatically index within Square9; what used to take them months to do one bill is now taking less than a week.”
Not surprisingly, he finds the knowledge of most customers regarding workflow solutions is modest at best. “You kind of have to teach people,” said Feinstein. “They understand that there’s software to do that, but they don’t know where to look or what it is.”
Most workflow implementations start with one process or one department and then grow into other departments. An implementation might begin in the accounting department and over time branch out into other departments such as HR or marketing.
Impact Networking in Waukegan, IL has been a DocuWare dealer since 2005. That solution has been an excellent fit for Impact’s core customers. “It’s best of breed within that midsize document management space as far as functionality,” opined Frank DeGeorge, general manager of Impact’s Strategic Services Group. “It fits in small and midsize companies which is what we target.”
The dealership prefers to stay vertical independent with whatever it sells because as DeGeorge pointed out, Impact serves every vertical. Pinned down, however, he acknowledged that Impact has had good success in everything from distribution to various types of financial companies with the DocuWare solution.
In the past Impact’s customers hadn’t considered document management as a way to improve their workflow although it’s not unusual now for end users to be more aware that their business would be more efficient if their workflow processes were automated. And a document management solution such as DocuWare is a good jumping off point for automating that workflow. Plus it’s a natural evolution for some organizations who have automated the workflow in other segments of the business.
“They’ve invested significantly in other types of systems such as ERP and accounting, warehouse management, but the way they’ve moved the paper has pretty much stayed the same,” acknowledged DeGeorge.
Impact Networking starts a workflow conversation by helping customers understand that most business processes, even though all the data is electronic, are still triggered by hard copy documents. “We walk them through that conversation and try to understand what kind of challenges they have,” explained DeGeorge.
The challenge he says is getting them to accept that a change is in order, which isn’t always easy because they’ve been handling the workflow manually for so long. Impact’s approach is to explain what they’ve done for other companies and how it’s affected those companies’ bottom lines. “Rarely do we go into a company and say we want to automate the process and do it using workflow,” stated DeGeorge
Another challenge of implementing a workflow solution is getting the customer to understand that they can realize a significant improvement in their business processes. Impact backs that up with statistics from Gartner Dataquest, for example, while noting that the average person spends 20 percent of their time looking for information or the documents they use. “We like to hone in on their specific challenges, but it’s mostly about educating them on what the return can be and making them feel comfortable that we can pull it off,” said DeGeorge.
He has found two types of workflow within an organization even though Impact only focuses on one from a document management perspective. The first is business process workflow, which is handled by an ERP.
“We focus on the documents that drive your typical business process,” stated DeGeorge. “Depending on the type of company, if it’s a distributor where you’re talking about that customer and owner process, customer service, where the documents come from, how it gets matched up, and the way that process is automated.”
Impact prefers to focus on quick returns when selling a document management workflow application, which means they prefer to control the scope to fit the return while not over proposing a solution. A quick return for a purchase is 12-18 months while a lease yields an immediate return.
Documation, an office technology dealership in Eau Claire, WI, offers clients an array of workflow solutions, including MaxxVault’s Enterprise Edition, which they’ve been selling for nearly six years now. We initially interviewed Documation’s software director about MaxxVault, but he left the company shortly after our interview and we were unable to secure an interview with another Documation workflow expert or MaxxVault user before our deadline. What follows are his comments, which still remain valid about how MaxxVault Enterprise Edition has helped Documation enhance its customer’s workflows.
“MaxxVault tends to be a nice backline for an organization,” we were told. “On top of that you can add workflow functionality, meaning you can take an everyday mundane task and automate it.”
In the business world workflow within Documation’s customer locations is affected by other platforms and solutions such as PaperCut, Planet Press and NSi Autostore, and it’s important for those solutions and a document management workflow solution such as MaxxVault Enterprise to play nice together. That’s important for Documation.
“It’s very open ended, we can create complex solutions for the client, which looks like one solution; there’s a myriad of products working together,” noted Documation’s former software director.
The target market for MaxxVault Enterprise, at least when Documation is selling it are medium size businesses and certain verticals such as insurance, car dealerships, and technology firms.
Documation’s customers ask them about ways to improve their workflow almost every day. The majority are trying to figure out a way to be more efficient.
“Everybody’s budgets are cut and they’re trying to figure out how to take the same amount of workload or more and not have to increase the workforce,” stated the software director. “When they talk workflow, they’re trying to eliminate inefficiencies. There’s everyday stuff they don’t think about, they think about one process but don’t realize that there are many other processes that can be automated.”
Asked what he likes best about a document management workflow solution such as MaxxVault Enterprise, he cited its stability and how the company is customer centric. When customers make requests for certain capabilities, MaxxVault takes that feedback and often puts those capabilities into new releases of its product.”
As long as there are manual and inefficient digital workflow processes, there’s going to be opportunities for improvement and that’s a job that’s well suited to a host of document management solutions.
