It’s hard to disagree that 2019 was a challenging year for UK business, and even though we now have a slightly greater degree of clarity regarding Brexit, the climate remains a testing one for organisations striving to achieve and maintain a competitive edge in 2020.
We often hear from business people who have to carefully split their time between focusing on the ‘bigger picture’ and ensuring day-to-day operations are completed in a timely and efficient way. However, this need to focus on the bigger picture is often an added time pressure for those who already work at full capacity.
So in 2020, what solutions should you be considering implementing to help you respond to business challenges with resilience and agility, without compromising on the quality of day-to-day operations?
More time to focus
Repetitive, labour-intensive tasks can form a significant part of some day-to-day job functions, distracting those involved away from spend time on more intellectual and satisfying tasks. Ultimately, this can lead to boredom and frustration, and tempt some people to consider alternative employment.
Departments ranging from finance and IT to HR, operations and customer service, include many repetitive tasks, some of which involve document processing that lies at the heart of operations.
Customer, employee and supplier facing documents like welcome letters, payslips, invoices and statements are all essential communications and organisations must produce and deliver these documents in secure and compliant ways.
The manual creation and supply of these documents can be repetitive, labour intensive and costly, limiting productivity and profitability. They prevent people from focusing on more rewarding tasks: those that would benefit the department or wider corporate strategy.
Systems can also be slow to adapt to the changing nature of communications. Once single channel processing of data for printing, now needs to be managed across multi-channels: print and online. The volume of documents needed and expectations of an on-demand response can also make resources difficult to manage, compromising agility.
It therefore makes good business sense to consider outsourcing the production and distribution of documents in 2020 as part of a wider digital transformation strategy.
The future of document automation
By the end of 2020, 72% of companies are expected to have embarked on digital transformation across operations such as finance, IT, HR, operations and customer services with early adopters already realising the benefits of higher productivity, improved service, cost saving, security and accuracy.
While the thought of digital transformation might spark ideas for company wide change projects that takes time to deliver, you would start with document automation and with the right partner take small steps that bring rapid results. Partnering with an experienced document automation provider who offers secure, end-to-end solutions for both online and print communications, will allow you to reap the benefits of knowledge and experience across the development, implementation and growth of your projects, while enabling you to engage with just one supplier.
Innovative document automation solutions (such as Aceni by Datagraphic) do not involve licensing costs or time-consuming new software or hardware projects. They use data from an organisation’s existing software, removing the need for additional capital outlay and facilitating swift implementation, working with and enhancing legacy systems to deliver ROI in weeks, not years.
Document automation is without a doubt one of the best transformations your organisation can make in 2020 in order to enable it to rise to the challenges of the year – and indeed the new decade – ahead, and with the right partner, the transformation can be surprisingly simple.
