I have often said that document management is like a diet and exercise program. Everyone thinks it is a great idea, but few are ready to take concrete steps to change document procedures – just like most of us don’t want to change our diets and go to the gym. Organizational behavior needs to change, but old habits, such as printing or stamping them “Received” or attaching documents to an email and sending them to multiple recipients, are hard to break.

Changing company culture and ingrained employee behavior is difficult, but that is exactly what needs to happen when it comes to document processing and document management.

Business documents and transactional data are the lifeblood of any organization. Take the example of procuring major goods or services.

Often, these transactions begin with a Request for Proposal (RFP), contract negotiations followed by purchase order, a good receipt, and an invoice. Each step of this process requires multiple stakeholders to gather data, review supporting documents for accuracy and then attach those documents to the transactional system in order to have the complete story. This process happens over and over for all transactions that are done in the normal course of business.

  

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How these documents are stored and managed is all part of document processing. This process can be broken down into a few key steps: centrally storing the documents, maintaining versions of the documents, and showing redlines and comments during document creation. Documents are then stored and classified in a repository that matches the company’s records retention. While this can make the document quickly and easily accessible, it serves other purposes too. Properly storing documents can aid in the discovery process in the event of litigation, marking the documents on legal hold, and finally, the destruction of those documents according to the records retention schedule.

Many organizations begin the journey of document management with the automatic processing of invoices. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is used to identify key pieces of data needed to complete the three-way match process marking the transaction for payment.

This process often can pay for itself by improving the number of discounts received due to payment terms and the speed at which items can be processed. This allows the company accounts payable processor to focus on rejected items not suitable for the automated payment process. This model can process contracts, tax documents, or I9 documents similarly.

The digital twin represents the next phase of document processing. Having P&ID, OEM diagrams and other technical drawings tied to the transaction system can be very powerful.

This would allow equipment planners to take operational data, along with the drawing and equipment maintenance history, into consideration to help maintain the lifecycle of these assets.

Imagine a system where a maintenance engineer looking at data from a piece of equipment can pull up the drawing for that equipment, and the system can display maintenance activities, component inspections, and maintenance info, including materials replaced, who performed the maintenance, and the total cost of that maintenance activity. This complete story, with the ability to start with the drawing and pull in a full range of data points, puts a wealth of information on vital business assets at the users’ fingertips.

IT organizations that provide document management/processing capabilities to their business, developing them as products that can be delivered and reused in many business processes, can add tremendous value. Importantly, however, such technology is only half the picture. As always, the human factor makes the difference. That means the culture and behavior of how the organization handles these documents – and implements document processing technology – must be supported through a well-thought change management plan. Such a plan will both ensure user adoption and leverage document management technology’s power more effectively for the enterprise’s benefit.