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If you are looking for ways to maximize the value of business information, you can be successful with both proactive and reactive strategies. In this post, we’ll cover access to and visibility of your data and documents, in-process and while archived.
Granular configuration control over your content will yield efficiencies, promote compliance and enforce information security. By proactively controlling access, visibility and actions for each user or group, you will protect confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive information. InfoSec can be achieved using administrative controls through Active Directory permissions and configuration settings in capture, workflow and repository software. When managed correctly, it exposes only that which each worker is qualified to see and/or act upon.
Information processing analytics allow you to gain visibility into your business processes, content data and information from external systems. This allows you to react immediately to potential problems to pinpoint risk potential long term. Customer transaction data to take a proactively nurture that relationship. Analytics dashboard can be specifically configured to provide different information to different groups, from business process managers to C-level executives.
Business process intelligence can help you:
Controlling access to your information should be easy to configure, but unfortunately in many systems it is not. ILINX information management software makes easy configuration a priority. Get administrative control over visibility and actions in ILINX Capture, ILINX Capture Workflow or ILINX Content Store, even without in-depth IT knowledge.
Our business intelligence platform, ILINX Analytics, is no different. It’s flexible and easy to use with any level of technology expertise. Depending on user permissions, you can expose data from any business system, from ECMs to ERPs. View and easily share reports. Expose, hide group and sort data, move columns and manipulate in multiple ways. And finally, gain visibility and insight into critical information that will improve information processing and help make better business decisions to boost your bottom line.
Check out the 5 other posts in this series:
Ingest and Process Secure Data, Documents and Payments Real-Time During Customer Transactions
Extend Online Invoice Upload Capabilities to Business Partners
Advanced Automation and Robotics Process Automation (RPA) Maximize Efficiencies
Integrate Data from All Systems to Optimize Business Process Management (BPM)
Meet compliance and regulatory policies to mitigate risk of litigation
Business systems integrations can greatly increase efficiencies, both during and after the processing of data and documents. While processing mid-stream, integration between workflows, repositories and legacy systems can expedite throughput, eliminate errors and provide critical analytical data real-time. This helps mitigate risk by enabling you to meet both service level agreements and regulatory compliance. Sometimes this can be done without a single-line of code.
Post-processing, it’s possible to retrieve and display images from within virtually any application regardless of source—host based, Windows, Web or Citrix—with little to no development. This provides a cohesive system that allows data to pass easily between two or more applications, saving time and increasing efficiencies.
RPA allows fluidity, enabling a more effective labor force. It’s like putting your high-volume, low complexity tasks on steroids! Employees can be repurposed to provide essential jobs that require personal, human interaction and collaboration.
An important advantage of RPA is that it can be implemented without major retooling of each business process. Simply integrate RPA into your existing systems to mimic the way your FTEs would interact with it.
Business process integrations are instrumental in helping save money by:
As consumers expectations grow for more customization and personalization of their financial services experience, RPA can enhance the performance of customer engagement platforms. It also improves data agility for systems that support analytics, branch optimization, channel management, compliance management, performance management, risk management and mobility. In addition, RPA can provide on-demand integration between schemaless data (data lakes) with any business system.
Basically, robotic data integration removes barriers and extends your control over a broad range of data types and sources to better deliver business value. Not only does data integration untether you from the limitations of information silos, but it can help unify formats and data management across files, tables and streams.
Although business systems integrations, particularly with RPA, can seem overwhelming, it is possible to find all of this functionality in one platform. The ILINX suite of information management software can provide all of the afore mentioned benefits using a combination of ILINX Capture, ILINX Capture Workflow, ILINX eForms, ILINX Advanced Capture, ILINX Content Store, ILINX RPA and ILINX Analytics. They work together seamlessly to automate the integration of all your critical business data and document, during and after processing.
Check out the 5 other posts in this series:
Ingest and Process Secure Data, Documents and Payments Real-Time During Customer Transactions
Extend Online Invoice Upload Capabilities to Business Partners
Advanced Automation and Robotics Process Automation (RPA) Maximize Efficiencies
Control the Flow of Information and Access to Manage Risk and Identify Problems
Meet compliance and regulatory policies to mitigate risk of litigation
Technology leaders are jumping on the Robotics Process Automation (RPA) technology bandwagon for good reason. It yields tremendous value in a myriad of business and industry sectors. RPA automates repetitive manual tasks performed by human workers, so their time can be used in higher value responsibilities. Because manual actions occur in so many different business processes, RPA is one of the most rapidly expanding technologies today.
Common business processes that can benefit from the use of RPA technology include, but are certainly not limited to:
Two primary factors are driving the demand and embrace of RPA: tremendous ROI and improved quality of service. Typically, investment costs can be recouped in a very short amount of time—often just a few months—while ongoing savings can be substantial. RPA allows you to process disputes faster and more accurately, 24x7x365.
One global IT company estimates that 62% of customers will consider switching to a competitor after only one or two unpleasant experiences. Besides saving taxpayer money, even government agencies need to supply great customer service through speed and accessibility. Think about USPS, who now competes head to head with UPS and FedEx for shipping services.
For the purpose of this blog, let’s take the case of a large multi-national financial institution (we’ll call them $-Corp) with a customer service call center operation. They employ hundreds of Customer Service Representatives (CSRs), spanning multiple countries. As with many large corporate environments, call centers typically utilize several systems in their day to day business. These generally include a CRM system. Often, the CRM will interface with to pass data to and/or require data be passed back by ERP systems and/or other Line of Business (LOB) systems. Any of these systems may be commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) applications or custom applications developed in house. Further, these systems may or may not have Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) that allow for easy back end integration.
In this case, customers call into the $-Corp Call Center to dispute items on their financial records. Typically, customers will send in supporting documentation for their disputes. As with all high-volume transaction environments, CSR’s work to process as many transactions per day as possible. Every keystroke and mouse click is measured. These actions relate to Average Call Handling time, which directly translates to cost of operations. Thus, $-Corp Call Center is a prime process candidate for reducing costs and improving the Average Call Handling time.
$-Corp Call Center utilizes a fully automated business process workflow to address the core functional requirements of their operations. Processing disputes involves repetitive tasks that must happen on every single transaction. Prior to harnessing the power of RPA, CSRs manually keyed dispute information into two systems: the CRM system (in this case Salesforce) and on multiple screens of a LOB application that is the system of record (Customer Dispute Information System, or CDIS). Although this aging technology and will be replaced with a proper CRM system at some point in the future, for now, the Call Center must utilize this custom developed front end user interface with an AIX database backend. This is where RPA has provided huge value.
The initial Call Center solution utilizes the Enterprise Content Management system (ECM) infrastructure already in place to automate the processing of supporting documents submitted by the customer. An import utility is used to capture incoming electronic documents from an upload portal on $-Corp’s website and convert them to TIFF files using a format conversion tool. Advanced Capture is used to OCR these documents, as well as scanned paper letters, forms, etc. that are mailed in. Extracted information is then infused as metadata into the workflow process that CSRs use to work through disputes with customers. When the CSR completes a dispute transaction and submits the record into the CDIS system, ILINX automatically passes the data to Salesforce.
Let’s circle back to the repetitive tasks requiring CSRs to manually key information. Since this data has been electronically captured and extracted, RPA agents (or bots) are utilized to update the CRM and LOB systems and monitor the updates for failures. RPA technology takes a push of XML data from a Salesforce dispute record and inserts that data into the various screens in the CDIS interface. It then submits the record and returns transaction information back to Salesforce.
The manual keying of that information into other systems, like $-Corp CSRs did before the bots took that task, can involve hundreds of keystrokes per case. It can also require specific formatting of the data. RPA addresses data formatting taking existing data from one source and apply it to another source, thus eliminating the possibility of human error when keying. By using RPA to execute the redundant and manual tasks, every single transaction, performed by hundreds of CSRs every day, shaves time off of the Average Call Handling time. In this environment, quickly completed transactions are king. The ROI, estimated by the Call Center staff for this solution, is significant. They expect to recoup the initial investment within year one.
The RPA solution alone was a significant benefit to the Call Center operations. Yet, RPA provides exponential value when coupled seamlessly with existing workflows, and associated backend processes: onboarding of electronic and paper content, OCR technology, integrations, etc. These ECM technologies further enhance a comprehensive and PCI compliant solution that is easily scalable as $-Corp continues to grow. Scaling the RPA solution can be as simple as adding additional VDIs or adding additional server resources to the solution to address additional volume.
Because of the successful deployment in the Call Center, $-Corp is currently investigating additional business processes in multiple departments that will benefit from RPA. With such sizable reductions in operational expenses and rapid ROI, they are anxious to find other areas to leverage the RPA capabilities in the ILINX ECM stack to achieve significant information technology wins.
You may be one of the 85% of enterprise decision makers who are racing to integrate digital initiative before falling behind. If so, the ability to allow customer, constituent, vendor and employee self-service on your websites can be one of the fastest ways to minimize back-office processing. Easy to stand up electronic form technology, backed by a powerful workflow engine, can connect people 24x7 on any device in collaborative business processes without paper, PDFs, or re-keying information.
Webform portals move automation to the front end of your business processes and can provide a relatively low-resource vehicle to automate endless processes, from human resources to customer service to accounting to public access. They deliver consistent performance that also supports exception handling. In other words, humans only need to be involved a fraction of the time.
Some of the most substantial value you can achieve from electronic forms is gained through integrations with your existing business systems: line-of-business systems, ERPs, CRMs, Case Management systems (CMS), home-grown systems, and even databases.
Data can be pulled from these systems to auto-fill, validate and correct data in form fields, real-time, helping to ensure complete and accurate data.
Anytime in the process, the submitted data can be pushed to these systems to update records immediately.
Here are some examples that are likely to deliver a quick ROI:
Smart eForms applications collect field data through a simple but highly functional user interface. It supports signatures, uploading documents, images with annotations, auto-calculation, action-based dynamic sections that expand or collapse, progress bars and pop-up calendars. This type of intelligent webform enables quick user completion while supporting accurate and complete information. From social services to Higher Ed to financial services organizations—any business unit that has to process high volumes of applications as quickly as possible.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has put the burden on already-strapped government agencies to provide requested information in a timely manner. Likewise, private companies have similar pressure to comply by producing documents or suffer sizable fines. In fact, cottage industries have cropped up that make exorbitant requests that are extremely difficult to fulfill, and thus provide an opportunity to cash in on litigation.
Online webforms enable requests to be processed in a trackable and transparent manner, both for the requestor and the fulfillers. Under the covers, there is sophisticated technology to automate redaction, search, routing and document management, particularly for popular requests. These tools, beginning with the portal, allow organizations to meet compliance without adding resources.
Accounts payable can be one of the most document-intensive business processes. Although many invoices originate as digital documents or email, their efficiencies can be seriously limited without an efficient way to insert them into your ERP system. An invoice upload portal can provide several advantages, both for the submitting and the receiving organizations. An upload via a portal kicks off a workflow that provides visibility to the status of both invoices in-process and archives. Webform ingested invoices can enter quick, hands-free processing. Benefits include visibility to cash flow and early payment discounts.
HR departments can be one of the most process intensive departments, from employee onboarding documentation, leave requests, expense forms, change of name or address, and many more. HR forms exposed on an intranet portal provides 24/7 self-service on any device. Integration with your business applications and databases expedite form filling. Database look-ups can pre-fill, auto correct and validate as the employee is typing. Once submitted, powerful workflow routes for approval, validates data, provides alerts and reminders, and pushes data back to update business systems.
Improved service to your customers, constituents and employees is the core benefit of front-end automation. Processes that took weeks can be reduced to days or even hours. Lower costs, fast execution, reallocation of workers’ time provide additional advantages. In addition, these benefits can be compounded with cutting edge technologies like machine learning and robotic process automation (RPA).
With the right product, you can think of portals as the gateway to true automation. Our webform portal solutions utilize the powerful ILINX eForms platform, which provides end-to-end automation that can be extended to many processes.
Let us know if we can provide additional information about how webform portals can enable self-service and move automation to the front of your business processes. Our powerful workflow, and the ability to integrate with almost any business system, sets ILINX eForms apart from other electronic forms solutions. All ILINX software is enterprise ready so it can easily be extended from department to department. Visit our website to learn more about ILINX eForms, request specific information here, or give us a call at 360-943-9273.
The differences in eForms offerings on the market could be compared to phones. You have your basic hard-wired wall unit, your cordless (but hardwired) model and finally, your smartphone—a high powered hand-held computer. They provide the same basic functionality, but one saves you oodles of time, integrates your data and content, and seems to have unlimited applications.
Smart electronic forms, the kind that can provide serious process efficiencies, have 5 essential components.
If you’re vetting electronic form solutions, you’re obviously ready to move past paper. But the capabilities of very few eForms platforms run deep and provide end-to-end automation that can be extended to many processes. Do your homework. You don’t want to invest in a touch-tone, wall-mounted model in this era of pocket-sized-super-computer phones.
Let us know if we can provide additional information about how smart eForms can maximize efficiencies in your business processes. Visit our website ILINX eForms, request specific information here, or give us a call at 360-943-9273.
