What is Document Automation?
Document Automation is a software-based process of assembling repetitive documents to meet specific business needs. The definition of document automation extends to document assembly, document creation or document generation. It can be divided into two major categories; mass document creation and ad-hoc document creation.
MASS DOCUMENT CREATION
Mass document creation addresses document assembly issues often faced by government departments, banks or utility providers that generate high volumes of repetitive documents. These typically are generated using databases as their main form of input, requiring minimal human interaction, are printed and mailed, or published as PDFs and emailed to customers. Traditionally mass document creation processes are relatively inflexible and provide limited agility to customize content for specific customer segments. A utility statement from a utility provider for example, would be generated by retrieving a customer’s current contact details from one database and their usage data from another, inserting them into a standardized statement template and mass-produced and distributed with thousands of statements produced in the same way.
AD-HOC DOCUMENT CREATION
Ad-hoc document creation or personalized document creation is targeted at document issues relating to more customer-centric industries such as Insurance, Education and Healthcare in which higher levels of customization and segmentation is required. These systems typically provide a user-friendly interface allowing business users to design, manage and implement a document cycle that is inherently more flexible, can target the right customer, with the right message, at the right time. A simple example of an ad-hoc document creation process would be an employment contract for a large commercial enterprise. In this case a Human Resources Officer would enter data such as the contact, term, role and location of employment into a template previously designed and approved by the HR Director. Interfaces can also automate additional options in the document to cater for multiple work locations, specific role-based information such as workplace health and safety content, or perhaps subsidiary company logos or address details.
Document Automation provides a powerful tool set to allow centralized management and control of document templates, content and format, ensure documents generated comply with legal requirements and that they are absolutely consistent, whether it’s an online pre-admission form for a few hundred hospital patients a day, employment contracts for tens of thousands of employees worldwide or hundreds of thousands of shipping labels and invoices being produced for trade and logistic organizations.
WHY IS DOCUMENT AUTOMATION IMPORTANT?
As businesses grow, strict compliance to legal standards and brand image style guides in documents becomes more important at the same time and more difficult to manage. As document volumes grow ‘document chaos’ is the inevitable result, with business unit managers unable to maintain strict controls on the lifecycle of their documents, risking increasing exposure to compliance problems and legal liability.
Best practice Document Automation solutions use the power of a single, current, strictly administered library of approved document templates and content in the generation of documents. Business unit managers have the power to centrally control document generation, minimizing labor costs on inefficient manual processes, reliance on IT departments for template updates and minimizing costs resulting from legal ramifications of incorrect or out-of-date documents.
Intelledox infiniti™ provides an Intelligent Document Automation solution that allows for easy centralized customization of content from multiple data sources and creation of templates through the drag-and-drop online wizard creation. Intelledox also leverages corporate data sources in the document automation process and can produce outputs in a range of formats based on business or customer preferences. Back end integration with information repositories also provides significant information governance benefits to the enterprise.
Intelledox infiniti™ provides significant return on information management investments, provides enhanced tools for business managers to customize document templates and generation rules, all while dramatically reducing risk of inconsistency and non-compliance in document automation.
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