New to Document Intensive Process Automation?

The following are key terms to help you understand your opportunities.

Introduction

Paperless Office Solutions, Inc combines best of breed software products with decades of expertise in document, records, and content management including “Enforced Records Management.”  Our extensive experience includes document driven workflow for automating paper-intensive business processes that are costly, error-prone, and slow. 

Our solutions are architected for state and local governments, schools and school districts, programs like Title 1, medical practices, clinics, and regional hospitals, as well as small to medium businesses, legal practices, insurance companies, and others. 

We have taken technology that heretofore only the largest corporations could afford and, thus, benefit from and made these affordable and useful to our customers and markets.  These technologies are proven and our close support service helps you leverage the greatest value from them both now and later.  Our technologies and integrated solutions can be extended to include new features and functions to meet changes in your business requirements as they occur.  Our solutions can be expanded to accommodate your growth and our services can be tailored to meet seasonal requirements as needed. 

Below are just some of the major technology components we apply to meeting our customer’s needs.

Document Management

Document management allows you to store not only scanned images of paper documents but all of your electronic documents as well.  In fact, if you can view it on a screen or print it, you can store into our document management systems.  You can even store dictation (both .wav and MP3 files formats) thus saving on the cost of transcription. You can store and organize pictures, video, and other digital information formats such as lab systems reports, medical imagery, and more. 

Moreover, you can find documents using search engines that would cost you thousands of dollars were you to buy them separately. Documents are organized according to your methods and practices not the dictates of a system. You can share documents with which you work collaboratively with others…

·          Doctors, Lawyers, CPAs and Accountants

·          Government

·          Education; among schools, schools and district offices, schools and parents.

These robust capabilities can be provided as stand-alone systems (everything in a single box), office / enterprise-wide systems, and as services provided from our data center.

Records Management

 Records management is a discipline prescribed in law and governed by various regulations whereas document management is more about organization and accessibility.  Document management focuses on finding things quickly and being able to work on them as needed whereas records management focuses on compliance with one or more regulations or laws and, once documents become records, changing them is usually not allowed.  Records management is selective; i.e., not everything is to be kept as a record of the business or transactions within the business. In fact, it is decidedly good practice to insure that what does not have to be retained is not retained.  Things you want to keep that are not records can be ‘archived’ instead. 

A key benefit to document management is the ability to establish “life cycles” one of which may be records management.  Life-cycle setting is not only mandatory for record management; the duration of the life-cycle is typically established by regulation or law. 

Bad practices in document management can impede business processes and impose greater operating costs than are necessary.  Bad practices in records management, however, often results in fines, lost litigation, and even jail.

Our records management solutions are closely integrated with document management to insure a seamless transition from being a business artifact to a legal record of the business. 

Practice safe business …get and use proven records management.

Workflow

Workflow is virtually ubiquitous if you think about it.  Everything you do includes some form of workflow. The critical difference is whether it is productive workflow and paper intensive, manual workflows tend to be the least productive.  In any work environment, the enterprise is built on business processes.  These are supported by one or more workflows.  In our experience, roughly thirty-five percent of all workflows are redundant and seventy-five percent or more are less efficient than they should and could be. 

Inefficient workflows cost money at the bottom line.  They generate errors so frequently and commonly they are perceived to be “normal” and, as such, often spawn even more workflows to remedy the errors.  As a rule, inefficient workflows can be quickly identified as those having the most amount of human “intervention” which can include walking a document around to be approved and/or signed, or manually finding and returning files, or copying documents so they can be distributed to control or multiple information points. 

Applying automated workflow will reduce the number of workflows and will reduce if not eliminate human intervention altogether.  Automated workflows tend to produce fewer if any errors.  In all cases, automated workflows reduce business costs adding, not taking, money to your bottom line.  If that is not enough, automated workflows improve your ability to deliver world-class customer service …service your customers, clients, or patients will notice and will appreciate. 

We provide document driven workflow.  Some occur when a document arrives into your business launching notifications and distributing the document to waiting processing points.  Some are driven from the content of electronic forms.  Content driven workflow arguably produces the single greatest gains in business process productivity and in reducing costs.  So much so that the typical return on investment (ROI) is measured in weeks and months, not years.  So much that the combination of electronic forms and automated workflows can provide significant competitive differentiation between those who have it and those who do not. 

We apply workflow technologies that leverage our electronic form and document management technologies.  This produces a tighter integration resulting in a faster, lower cost ramp into production which, in turn, produces the fastest ROI and subsequent business gains.  Our workflow solutions are web-oriented just as are most of our document management and electronic forms solutions. This allows a greater use of the technology while insuring the utmost is safety and security of information.

Electronic Forms

 In most processes regardless of whether it is business, education, legal, medical, or government, the majority of documents we use are forms of one kind or another or documents that could easily be built as a form even though they might outwardly not look like one. 

In the past, electronic forms proved their value in reducing the need to stock paper forms and were easier and faster to modify when required.  These forms were usually printed and then “filled” or, completed.  

Later, these same forms could be filled while displayed on a computer screen then printed and submitted or processed.  This additional capability further enhanced the value of electronic forms. 

These values are certainly continued in current state-of-the-art electronic forms technology.  They have been enhanced by orders of magnitude in value by applying ‘intelligence’ to these forms through the use of ‘rules’ and the ability to quickly move information onto the form (“pre-populate”) and off (“extractions”) into databases and applications.  This allows business to verify addresses while the form is completed.  Online forms can even verify credit scoring, insurance coverage, residence requirements, and identity during the completion of the form. 

We see electronic forms all the time on the worldwide web.  Most of these forms are created using HTML which is an excellent way to closely link a form to a specific application like buying goods and services on the internet.  But, these same HTML forms …though often used… do not make the best general purpose business forms. 

This is true because the rules and logic applied in these forms is either under the control of a specific business application or are unique to this particular form.   Business forms are often used for multiple business or practice purposes and, particularly those that are legally governed or regulated, are best served when the rules and logic can be centrally managed for all forms.  This simplifies forms creation, management, and distribution insuring consistency and compliance where required. 

Because the forms technology we provide is “thin-client,” it imposes little to no impact on your network and storage systems, whether desktop or server.  Completed forms are automatically filed into their proper places in the document management and / or records management system and forms are content searchable using you normal browser.  Our forms technology, like our document management technology uses search engine technology that usually costs much more than what you will pay for a completely integrated solution. 

Moreover, our electronic forms solutions support digital signing which augments the legal status of the document as well as further securing the document.

Digital Signature

 Electronic signing of documents has been around for a few years and encouraged by legislation enacted in the 1990's. Surprisingly, digital signature technology was not extensively used by business for a variety of reasons not the least of which is the perceived threat of forgery.  This leads to the concern that electronic signatures can be too easily and, thus, too often re-pudiation. 

In fact, most signatures are used inside a business to acknowledge that the document has been reviewed or applied to indicate approval.  These applications can be easily achieved through basic “click-wrap” operations; e.g., “click-to-approve.” This action moves or, “promotes” the document ahead in whatever workflow it is engaged. 

Legal signatures applied to contracts …e.g., sales documents where money changes hands… and government documents can be applied through a variety of secured, “know-the-signer” technologies all of which can be applied to our electronic form and document management solutions.  In some cases, added levels of security are achieved by using a third party who guarantees the authenticity of the signature.  When this is required, the third-party participation is transparent to the principle parties and is fully “logged” in the workflow history for future audits, etc. 

Perhaps the greatest feature of digital signatures whether “click-to-approve” or the more rigorous digital signatures are their ability to “bind” or lock the document.  This prevents changes being made to document content without signer’s permission or knowledge and, if fact, will visibly and digitally void signatures when unauthorized changes are attempted. This allows mortgage documents, a variety of legal contracts, and government applications including affidavits to be electronically signed.  A digital signature even works when there are multiple signing parties and multiple signing points in the documents including “initials.”  

Paperless Office Solutions, Inc. possesses a broad range of practical experience in these technologies and their underlying business requirements. We can provide you with the benefits of our experience, knowledge and industry relationships with products, integration training, strategic consulting, and on-going education programs.