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Document Processes and Workflows

What will help your organisation reduce overheads and improve productivity? Well defined business processes with the ability to effectively store documents and control them in an automated workflow.

How do we know?

We’ve been implementing our document management system DocuWare long enough to understand how the solution can improve your business internally and for your customers.  We know what works and what changes can be made to enhance customer service and employee satisfaction.

A business process is a series of steps taken in a certain order that once complete, achieves a particular goal. A workflow however describes the automation of these processes and the tools or software used to oversee the sequence of tasks.  A company runs on processes across all departments, but making them work as efficiently as possible is where our solutions can help.

At DWS we will work with you to understand every step of your processes and use our Workflow Manager to connect each step with an action. These actions are based on employee decisions and your business rules.

Well Documented Processes

Well documented processes are perfect for transferring into a digital workflow. If a process already has defined steps, these can be replicated in DocuWare with the same rules applied.  A document can be easily tracked throughout its lifecycle and archived when it no longer needs processing.

If you need some help in determining your processes, we can happily go through this with you using our process planner.  To get the most out of automated workflows it’s a good idea to have everything properly planned out before you make the move to digital.

Workflow Management

With workflow management, complex processes are mapped and managed. A variety of scenarios can be included for processing tasks, with information added from different sources.  If a task is assigned to a member of staff who is on holiday, a number of other employees can be added in as the next in line to complete the task instead.  You decide which conditions are applied to each task, such as an invoice for over £5,000 must be directly routed to the Head of Finance, rather than the Finance Assistant.

Capture

Accurately capturing the data that’s entering DocuWare is vital.  For a workflow to function well it relies on processing information, so making sure the data is correct from the beginning is an important step. DocuWare’s Intelligent Indexing automatically captures data from scanned documents and uses it to populate index fields.  These index fields are how a document is described and classified to ensure it can be found and assigned correctly.

Tasks

Tasks are those parts of the process assigned to an individual or team to ensure the workflow can be completed.  With DocuWare, tasks can never ben missed when they are automated and included in the workflow.

Example

1. An invoice is received and is added to the digital cabinet for incoming invoices.  The workflow is triggered.

2. A digital task has been created and DocuWare checks the invoice against a previously stored purchase order.

3. The invoice is forward to Accounts Payable.

4. The invoice appears as a task for the Accounts Department, is checked and if correct, assigned to a cost centre and then moved on for approval.  If incorrect, a task can be created for another team member to investigate further.

Documents are important to all organisations, each having a part in your processes as well as triggering tasks to be performed.

How Well Do Your Processes Work?

Do you have trouble with lost documents, mis-paid invoices or lost orders?  All this can be avoided by implementing a document management system with automated workflows.  Your processes will run more smoothly, the data will be more reliable and employees will be more efficient.

Our clients see a Return on Investment almost immediately with the biggest gain being time to invest into more productive areas of the business, rather than chasing missing invoices or managers for approval.

Can your business afford to carry being inefficient with no transparency?  Or do you need to make change today?


Book a FREE Proces Assesment

Independent Private Schools

How Does Managed Print Management Work For Independent Private Schools?

For most educational institutions, print is a costly monthly burden that can quickly add up. However with our managed service for schools you will have access to secure and easy printing from any device while protecting sensitive student information – all for a fixed fee.

Print management gives the school’s administrators tools to find inefficiencies in their printer networks. With so much hustle and bustle, important processes and systems often get overlooked or pushed aside.

By implementing a managed print solution service, schools can save time and money by eliminating future headaches. The educators’ attention can then be focused on what matters most – keeping students safe and helping them to learn at school.

A robust managed print service for educational establishments will go beyond print management and include value added features that enables students and teachers to print responsibly, safely and efficiently each and every school day.

Educational institutions that partner with one of our managed print services will be able to implement a custom all-inclusive managed print service, which will save time and money without sacrificing productivity and most importantly, will provide a reliable and accessible secure print environment for all students and faculty.

What Should a Managed Print Service for Schools Look Like?

The foremost priority of every school is to facilitate learning, so they need to be equipped with the tools and technology to enable students. When teachers’ valuable time is spent attending to print problems, the quality of education decreases with students being left at a disadvantage.

A comprehensive print management system can quickly provide any school environment secure print workflows that grant greater accessibility and enhanced data security for the students and teachers.

So, the question is, what key elements and features make up a robust print management service?

The service should include

Easy To Use Dashboard

An intuitive web-based dashboard makes it easy for administrators to keep up with equipment repair and maintenance schedules even across the bigger educational establishments. 

Point Policy Management and Rules Based Printing

These tools shape the print environment based on the school’s user behaviour. For example, a school can implement an eco-friendly print policy that encourages users to take responsibility for their printing habits by discouraging users from printing emails or web pages in Colour.

Find Me Printing

This feature provides the ability to deliver one logically named print que to staff and students, increasing confidence that the print job is being securely printed.

Badge Release and Follow Me Print

Teachers, students, and staff can utilise their access control cards or fobs to securely release print jobs at their own convenience, from any printer within the school with the correct permissions.

Touchless Print

In this post pandemic world, schools should limit the number of physical touch points in their environment. Touchless release allows staff members to walk up to a printer and use their phone to scan a QR code quickly and conveniently to immediately see the print jobs that they have readily available within the print system.

Print Deploy

IT managers can implement the right printer drivers in the right queues at the right time, minimizing printer deployment time.

Mobility Print

Securely and easily print remotely or print outside the school network by sending print jobs over the internet

Benefits of a comprehensive Managed Print Service for Schools and Education?

Educational institutions that employ a custom-made managed print service can expect to see immediate advantages. The benefits of a comprehensive print service include,

  • Data Security Compliance
  • Drastically reduced costs and waste
  • Greater Accessibility
  • Serverless printing Infrastructure

Do you Need an Extensive Xerox DWS Print Management Service for your School?

When choosing the right print management service, you should employ an all-inclusive solution that reduces costs, improves accessibility, maximises productivity, and ensures data security and regulatory compliance.

A truly extensive print management service will also address safety concerns associated with COVID – 19 protocols through advanced added features (such as touchless release) to provide peace of mind for everybody within the school environment during these uncertain times.

Schools that partner with our award-winning managed print service will implement a custom print management system and are investing not only in the productivity of their students and faculty but their safety as well. This all – encompassing, systematic approach to print management will ensure the successful implementation.

If you would like to discuss further, please contact us on 01444 462980 

Digital Mailroom

Process Improvement Ideas: A Digital Mailroom

Digital Mailroom


A digital mailroom is the effective and digital (believe it or not!) way of managing all incoming post. Sorting electronic and paper mail in a timely manner to ensure they reach the right department when needed.

Remember when receptionists could sit for hours each day, opening the post with a letter knife and walking around the office delivering mail to the right person? I do, as it used to be me!

That may still partly be the case for some organisations but these time consuming processes cause delays and affect how businesses communicate with customers and suppliers.

A digital mailroom provides a pathway to change by reducing paper use, limiting the need to print and efficiently organising information.

Think about amount of inbound data your business receives; in the post, via email, phone calls, web orders and then how it’s organised and by who. Is everyone following the same system and is information being stored in the same way?

If the answer is no, things could be getting a little hectic and during busy times, your existing processes could buckle under the pressure.

A Digital Mailroom and Document Management

Digital Mailroom

Digital mailroom solutions mean your incoming post is dealt with and stored in the same way by everyone no matter what format it is received in.

With a Document Management System, paper documents are scanned in while emails can be automatically stored from an inbox. Whether it’s a supplier invoice or a contract with a new customer, all incoming data gets stored in one central and secure location.

Only authorised users can use the system and access to documents can be strictly controlled, for                                    example HR are the only employees able to view staff records.

Integration with Internal Systems

Integration with Internal Systems

With DocuWare’s Connect to Outlook functionality, the system can integrate with Office 365 and automatically store emails from your inbox, making email management simple.

It can remove shared mail box headaches by monitoring a watch folder and when emails meet a certain criteria defined by you on implementation, they are pushed into document trays to be dealt with accordingly. Any incoming post marked as urgent for example, can be immediately forwarded to management.

Once a document is in DocuWare users can choose whether to trigger a workflow. If they select yes, a task is generated for the relevant person in the process. Whether it’s an invoice to be approved or a CV to be read, once the task is complete, a digital stamp can be applied to the document.

Intelligent Indexing

In order for any digital mailroom to operate successfully, accurate data, captured at the start of a process is vital. If incorrect information flows through the business, whether it’s from manual entry or missing information, problems will occur.

Once a document is in DocuWare, Intelligent Indexing runs on it to extract the most important pieces of information that are relevant for the organisation– dates, names, reference numbers etc. This information then becomes the document search criteria, bringing results back                                                              in seconds.

Intelligent Indexing is based on machine learning and with each scan, begins to remember where to find the most valuable information on a document. Any manual corrections are learnt too, continually increasing in speed and accuracy.

DocuWare can be linked with any business system. An invoice can arrive, be processed, stored and pushed to a Finance package without any manual intervention.

GDPR Compliant Software

With so many data protection regulations to follow it’s important to ensure any incoming post containing personal data is dealt with efficiently and compliantly.

The penalties for a GDPR infringement can range from a warning from the Information Commissioners Office to a maximum fine of 4% of an organisation’s annual global turnover.

With this in mind, any system used to process personal data needs to be GDPR compliant. DocuWare can help – it is quick and easy to locate any personal data stored within documents. It can export, correct and delete personal data while ensuring this data is protected for as long as it’s in the system.

The Benefits of a Digital Mailroom

A digital mailroom can be tailored to suit business processes and requirements. By automating incoming mail from receipt, through to capture and storage, organisations can benefit from a reduction in postage, print, physical storage and staff costs.

Adopting a digital mailroom will also help to reduce paper use, increase customer satisfaction and give staff more time to focus on other tasks away from the admin of processing mail.

Information coming from a variety of sources is electronically captured and classified meaning it’s readily available and accessible at any point in a process. Management can easily see where an invoice or a customer order is up to, as well as any tasks that haven’t been complete.

From experience with our clients using document management software, we know this level of automation works and they see the ROI.

If you’re thinking about implementing a digital mailroom, we offer free process assessments that can help.  We will chat with you about how you currently work, understand the challenges you’re facing and explain how an automated solution will streamline your processes.

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The Pandemic will bring changes

It is nearly a year now since the UK went into lockdown, although we have had a few breaks in the summer where restrictions were loosened, we are now back to where we were before, with the hope that the vaccine will give us hope that life will return to normal around Easter. However, realistically most medical experts believe the summer will be a time when normality may start to come back.

The big question is what does this mean for business? At the start of the lockdown companies reacted as best they could. Employees were instructed to work from home and the government gave help with a wide range of support including notably the Furlough scheme and bounce back loans. This position has been extended but will business be the same when normality begins to take place.

Predicting the future is difficult especially when the business environment is turbulent. Many companies are on their last legs and others are planning how they can gradually manage to restore their position with the years ahead. Will the office look the same? will people start to go back to work from the office again on a full-time basis?  do companies want to retain large offices? and how are business going to work in the future, all leading questions that need to be considered.

Looking at how many people have adapted to working from home it looks like there will be some long-term changes even if we do return to some form of normality in the summer and this is where we need to consider making changes now to manage the position in the future. A strong competitive business has the ability to communicate internally and externally effectively and one area since this pandemic has taken place is the issue of communicating internally. With all the business processes from the accounts department, human resources, sales, order processing, sharing information across different departments, working on projects together collectively, storing information and accessing documents has been difficult. Yes, the Cloud has been a great help, although the biggest issue is finding all the information in one place, working on projects together, sharing and accessing information. Another area that has become a headache is compliance and security and although information is held in the Cloud it does not mean that the information is secure and compliant.

With the cost of running the business and survival being of utmost importance many companies are now looking at ways to reduce operating costs whilst maintaining productivity and having a competitive edge in the marketplace. Investment in the IT infrastructure has never been more important and many companies are looking at a Document Management system to streamline the business to make it far more competitive, as well as linking all their systems together, meaning information is available at a touch of a button, business processes are streamlined, ensuring that business processes are speeded up and the requirement for office space and employee resource is reduced, cutting the costs dramatically for the business and making the company more competitive with plenty of room for controlled growth in the future.

If you would like to look at ways of streamlining your business, whilst improving all your internal business process, then perhaps its time to look at our Document Management software it will put your business back in the driving seat for now and especially the future.

Difficult times are ahead in Business

Difficult times are ahead in Business

Guy Fawkes tried to bring the country down on the 5th November 1605, the COVID Pandemic is more likely to bring this country to its knees in 2020/2021

Since March, companies throughout the UK have had to make some rapid decisions on how to cope with the immediate effect of this COVID pandemic and how they can operate and, more importantly, how they can survive.

The government came up with several very helpful support packages to help us get through the lockdown and since then we have been employing a number of these schemes to keep the business afloat.  As a number of these schemes are coming to an end in October the big question now is, where do we go from here?

We talked about the new normal with people working from home. Initially, financially for companies this looked an ideal solution to cut costs and continue operating and great for the employees as they did not have to commute and could work flexible hours. In some cases, this has actually been really beneficial for everybody.  Sadly, in other cases, people have found working from home has its distractions, as well as issues communicating properly internally and externally and has had a detrimental effect on the business.

Many businesses now have time to reflect. Initially, they reacted to the immediate issues threatening their livelihoods and put in tools to manage the position. Now, with a second lockdown looming in November, is this pandemic going to cause greater disruption than Guy Fawkes ever could by blowing up parliament?

It’s time to look ahead, respond to the position, accept that we are going to be living with this problem for quite some time and look at how we are going to operate in the future.  What plans, business tools, cost cutting, and employment decisions need to be made to keep in business?

The major costs that spring to mind are the office rent, the wage bill and office operating costs. A number of these costs can be difficult to cut as there are long term agreements in place. However, there are several other hidden costs that can be reviewed and, in many cases, can provide valuable income back into the business.

One area that you can look at immediately is the office operating costs and, if you are having to sadly make redundancies, you need to look at technology that can help manage the new position. This can be in areas such as unique software that provides full document management, meaning information is available at a touch of a button with full security and compliance or internal leases like office equipment that could be refreshed at much lower rates and more suitable for your future operating requirement and needs.

Where is there help?

Our business, Document Workflow Solutions, was set up in a joint venture with Xerox UK to help companies see the future and adapt to the changes companies are confronted with, as well as providing unique and valuable business tools that will cut costs, increase business efficiency and help provide a very competitive edge in your market place. If this is something your business wants to look at, we are happy to provide a free office audit and look at all your document costs and processes.  We have been very successful in helping many organisations make at least 30% savings and, in many cases, even greater cost efficiencies.

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What headaches do you have managing documents?

Does this sound familiar?

Incoming mail and information to the business

This is one of the most labour-intensive areas of the business, whether it is incoming mail, emails with PDF attachments or documents of any format coming from different departments or company subsidiaries. The information must be sorted, distributed to the correct recipient, managed, and filed for reference.

Filing and retrieval of information

There are so many ways people file information either electronically or hard copy. It is incredible to think, currently, we still have the same problems we had many years ago. Employees and departments all have their own indexing systems and a document can be misfiled making it difficult to find the information later.

Storage of information

In today’s business environment, many companies scan documents and save them electronically either in the cloud or internally on their servers. Many businesses also store most of their incoming email traffic on their server exchange without any thought about disaster recovery (if a record is deleted or lost because of a malfunction). There are still many companies that store hard copy documents in the office or at storage sites and this can be very expensive and labour intensive to manage.

Retrieval of information

This can be a very time-consuming exercise and stressful. Yes, it is easy to retrieve an email quickly if you know the content of what you are looking for and it can be fairly easy if the document has been filed electronically in the right electronic file. However, what if it is a PDF document? What if the document has been put back in the wrong file? What if the file has been taken out of the office or somebody else has taken it? What happens if the files are kept offsite from the office or in different software applications like CRMs and accounting packages? What time is wasted in retrieving the information and what is the cost?

Compliance and Security

This has become more of an issue today than ever with cyber crime growing in our society and company regulation being implemented on a daily basis, it has become very hard to manage and police within the business What is worse, companies not only lose money via the cyber crime, they are also under threat of financial penalties for non-compliance.

If you wanted to find the magic answers to the above and we can show you how this can be achieved.

Call 01444 462 980

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African woman working on new building plans while sitting at her desk. Female interior designer working at home office.

Working from Home is this the new working environment

Many companies now are changing their thought process on people working mostly from home as opposed to travelling into the office every day. With today’s new technology employing all the wonderful new computer tools, the cloud and advanced telecom facilities life would appear to be sorted, or is it?

One area that Xerox -DWS are very aware of is the cost of printing documents especially when buying a small home office multi-functional printer from the internet and buying consumables to run it. Initially this looks like the ideal solution as it’s a low-cost investment in the printer and then you buy the consumables when you need them at a competitive rate.  However, let’s look at this situation more closely:

All printer manufacturers make a fortune by selling the home office print devices cheaply and then selling the consumables on an ongoing basis. This is why print cartridges are so expensive and not only that, they change the printer models regularly so you have to keep buying different print cartridges even though the model you may replace from time to time looks so similar.  Worst still, if something goes wrong, trying to get any warranty work can be difficult especially if you have purchased cheap compatible print cartridges to keep the running costs down. This cancels the warranty and it is cheaper to buy a new one that get the current one repaired.

This may not even be the worst news because, if you are a company who have a number of home workers, trying to control the cost of print is virtually impossible and there are no tools to manage the position from afar so making this part of the IT budget is a nightmare. Another issue is, by using these small individual printers, companies do not have all the business scanning tools to scan documents into the company’s bespoke applications, making the whole process of managing information from the satellite home offices a nightmare.

Don’t despair though because the Xerox-DWS unique new all-inclusive solution for home workers, DocuCentre, is easy to use and offers a fully managed print solution, meaning you don’t need to worry about buying expensive consumables to run the machine or worry about trying to get the printer fixed if you have an issue.  It’s all done for you including onsite fixed maintenance.

IT managers will be happy as they have all the tools to control and manage the printers from afar and the users have a Xerox-DWS DocuCentre that prints high quality documents at speed, cost effectively with all the scan tools to integrate with the main offices business applications.  Added benefits include additional apps on the print device to enhance the home workers experience of producing and managing documents.

The really great news with this system is there is no initial purchase to be made, no long-term contract instead there is a monthly investment and cover for a 36-month period. If your requirements change there is flexibility to upgrade and at the end of the term, you can upgrade to the latest technology, backed by Xerox, the world’s finest Document management company.

To see how the DocuCentre could save your business time, money and hassle with staff working and printing documents from home, speak to us on 01444 462 980

Click on the link below for more info.

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Paperless2

A Paperless Office – Pipe Dream or Reality?

Old habits die hard

The concept of a paperless office is nothing new. Yet the average workplace is usually defined by a paper mountain (or two). While printers hum, photocopiers churn and filing cabinets overflow.

We are paper addicts: a generation who were taught to keep a copy of everything – just in case. The technology to go paperless exists but are we ready to embrace it? Innovative workflow tools mean we have the power to scan in our existing paper and eliminate the need for new paper enitrely! Thanks to highspeed broadband, cloud applications and high capacity storage, the sky’s the limit. But if fear of the unknown is holding us back – tot up the costs of printing out that paper mountain over the next five years!

Click here for the full Business Edge Magazine article