Business Process Automation "Why You Should Be Selling It"

Our Guest Blogger for the month of August is Rick Backus of Cybercon. Rick's got a really awesome approach on Business Process Automation. If you get a chance click the link on the bottom of the page and tell him your thoughts on the article!

Business Process Automation

Why You Should Be Selling It

Document management solutions are something most dealers (hopefully) are involved with at some level. The premise is fairly straightforward:
1) Capture a variety of business information from both paper and electronic sources.
2) Process, identify and classify the documents based on information on the documents themselves or provided during the capture phase.
3) Store the documents in a secure and organized manner using an established set of key fields that will facilitate easy retrieval and provide centralized access to all parties who need it.

Why do we store these documents in the first place? So we can find them later of course. But we tend to store them only after we are finished with them. What if they were stored immediately upon receipt? What if the medium used to store the documents would also initiate and drive the tasks the document represents? Would there be a business benefit to this?

Anyone selling solutions knows (or should know) that one of the principal client motivators for buying a system is to reduce the loss of documents and the time and resource costs associated with those losses. Once a document is stored it usually is not lost unless it is removed from storage for some reason. Most losses occur while the document is making the rounds through the organization, from user to user, department to department. If that is true then why not store the document immediately upon receipt and reduce the risk of loss. Without some sort of way to automate the process the document represents and use it in an electronic format this would be impractical if not impossible.

Enter business process automation or BPA. The process consists of integrating applications, restructuring labor resources, and using software applications throughout the organization to contain costs. For example let’s look at creating a purchase order.

It is 9:30AM and a customer order is submitted by sales that the client wants “yesterday”. Upon reviewing the order a clerk realizes there is no product available to complete the order. The clerk then creates a purchase order, prints it out and delivers it to the manager responsible for authorizing POs. Unfortunately the manager is out of the office until tomorrow, delaying the order.

The manager returns to work the next day, signs the PO and walks to the clerk’s desk and deposits it on the keyboard. The clerk is currently in a meeting. Upon returning the clerk does not find the PO because the IT guy (taking advantage of the clerk being away to install updates on the PC) moved the PO from the keyboard and set it on another stack of papers. Again, delaying the order.

After a couple of phone calls, a reprint and resigning, the PO is finally faxed to the vendor. 24 hours have now passed since the order was originally submitted. I could embellish further by explaining that the original fax never reached the intended recipient but I won’t. I think the point has been made.

Now we rewind back to the original order submission but this time instead of printing a hard copy of the PO, a pdf is created and two things happen. The pdf is immediately sent to the document management system where it is identified, classified and stored in the appropriate location and an email is sent to the clerk confirming the capture and processing of the PO with a hyper-link to it if needed. Another email is sent to the manager (who remember is out of the building) with a link to the same document.

The manager uses their laptop or smartphone to open, review and sign the PO saving it as a new version of the original document which generates a new email alert to the clerk that the PO is approved.
The clerk reviews the PO and forwards it directly to a group email address at the vendor so it will be processed as soon as possible. It is now 10:30AM.

That was BPA in action. The time and resources saved by employing that simple process could mean the difference between filling and losing an order. And we only scratched the surface. If you are not using BPA as part of your solution strategy I strongly advise you to take a serious look at it. BPA is a tremendous cost-justifier that, when combined with a full featured document management application will help you close more business.

-=Good Selling=-

http://www.cybercon1.com/