Top Use Cases for Document Management

While the feature set of a document management system can be robust, it’s not always easy to identify where and how to use the tools effectively. Below are a few use cases that highlight the benefits of implementing a document management system in your organization.

Use Cases for Finance Departments

A highly regulated part of any business, a finance department can find many benefits in implementing a document management system:
  • Customer invoicing: Find new efficiency with the ability to quickly locate and distribute documents to relevant parties, creating transparency throughout the invoice management process.

  • Audits: Make auditors’ jobs easier with audit trails that give a detailed history of actions performed on each document in your repository.

  • Purchase order (PO) generation: Apply metadata to purchase orders, making them easier to identify and match to invoices.

  • General ledger: Improve transparency and accuracy in reporting on cash flows with document management software that makes it easy to search for and retrieve financial information.

Use Cases for HR Departments

As the department usually responsible for employee onboarding and support, human resources can have many documents to manage on any given day. Here are a few ways a document management system can help:
  • Policy transparency: Keep a centralized repository for employee handbooks and other documents outlining policies, so employees always have easy access to them.

  • Status changes: Easily locate and retrieve relevant information when employees onboard, offboard or change departments.

  • Performance reviews: Keep information on employee performance protected in a repository with robust security controls.

  • Benefits enrollment: Host a centralized repository for relevant benefits enrollment resources, so employees can make informed decisions about their benefits.

Use Cases for Legal and Compliance Departments

For legal and finance departments, accuracy and efficiency is an essential part of conducting business, and helping to ensure audits of their organizations go smoothly. Below are some ways these departments can benefit from implementing a document management system.
  • Sharing content with clients and customers: Use secure file sharing tools to keep track of any documents sent outside your organization.

  • Legal review and contract approvals: Speed up approval processes with digital document templates that make information easy to review.

  • eDiscovery: Keep information both secure and accessible with robust security controls to only allow authorized access to content, and full-text search capabilities that enable those authorized to quickly locate requested information.

  • Contract negotiation: Version control capabilities make it easy to track significant revisions as contracts are changed and edited by relevant parties.

Use Cases for Customer Service Departments

Customer service departments rely heavily on the accuracy of their information in order to provide the highest level of service possible. Here are some ways a document management system can help these departments:
  • Customer satisfaction: Support customers and stay responsive to their needs with a centralized, secure repository that helps ensure information is accessible and accurate.

  • Public records and information: Increase transparency with public portals that deliver information to customers upon request.

Use Cases for IT Departments

Information technology departments are usually fielding many projects and requests at once. Without the right tools, resources can run thin quickly. Here are a few ways a document management system can help your IT department utilize its resources effectively:
  • Case management: Host a centralized repository that makes it easy to store, retrieve and share information about support tickets or ongoing projects.

  • Information governance: Utilize audit trails to track when, and by whom, actions were performed on your organization’s content.

  • Support resource hosting: Provide a centralized repository that employees can easily access for FAQs, documentation and guides.

  • Hardware device checkout: Collect information that can identify devices rented by employees, and store that information in a secure repository, so your organization can effectively keep track of equipment.

Use Cases for Sales Teams

The more information salespeople have, the more empowered they are to inform customers and close deals. Here are some ways a document management system can assist salespeople and their teams in generating revenue for your organization:
  • Sales contracts: Track changes to contracts as needed with version control tools that let you document significant changes to documents.

  • Sales tools: Provide a centralized repository that makes it easy for salespeople to access proposals, presentations and other sales tools.

  • Opportunity tracking: Quickly store and retrieve quotes, invoices and other sales materials to get a better view of prospective deals available to your sales team.

Use Cases for Business Continuity

Whether an individual unit or a group of individual experts across multiple departments, teams need effective tools to mitigate the risk that comes with disruptions to business. Here are a few ways a document management system can assist your organization in its efforts to create a more resilient enterprise:
  • Remote content access: When your office is inaccessible, host a cloud repository that enables employees to access any and all content they need from anywhere.

  • Data security and privacy: Utilize secure file sharing tools to mitigate security risks associated with email attachments, and keep any files, shared or otherwise, in a repository with robust security controls.

  • Communicating with customers: Facilitate customer requests for information and services from anywhere with online portals.

  • Disaster recovery: Host your content on a cloud infrastructure that’s supported by multiple availability zones to minimize data loss after disruptions.

Customer Spotlight: City University of Hong Kong

Learn how one university leveraged its document management system to better manage and protect the student and staff information it handles.

Continue Your Journey

Compare top document management vendors on G2

Check out the G2 Grid® for Document Management and compare top vendors on the market.
G2 Grid® for Document Management Software

Watch our video demo

Get an overview of key document management features within Laserfiche.

See Laserfiche in action

Want to further explore how Laserfiche can help your organization achieve its goals? Schedule a consultation today.

Can Generative AI and Content Services Increase Productivity and Transform Processes? Here’s How We’re Thinking About It.

Advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have led to the emergence of revolutionary technologies, such as generative AI. At Laserfiche, we believe that generative AI has the potential to fundamentally alter how people use technology and to change our lives — in our homes, in our classrooms and especially in our workplaces.

Laserfiche’s vision for how AI will transform the workplace focuses on empowering individuals to transform their work, take control of their processes, and supercharge their productivity — all without losing sight of increasingly important and ever-evolving data privacy and security standards.

Use cases for AI are diverse and ever-expanding, however, to achieve enterprise-wide transformation, organizations will need to deploy AI at scale.

What is AI at Scale?

Implementing AI at scale will require the use of AI across the enterprise to streamline operations, improve decision-making, and react faster to changes. Here are a few examples of business-critical processes that can be made more efficient and agile using AI technology:
  • Customer acquisition, service and strategy
  • Product development and service delivery
  • Financial analysis and capital management

Some of the challenges of deploying AI at scale include the creation of sophisticated data management frameworks that cover all components of a data lifecycle, and efficiently deploying AI solutions across platforms.

A content services platform is already foundational to an organization’s business-critical content and processes, managing data lifecycles including capture, storage, integration and disposition. These platforms are also often integrated with other core technologies to support the flow of information enterprise-wide, making it the ideal context in which to use AI and deploy it at scale.

Using AI within content services has the potential to uncover new ways to deliver business value, by accelerating the speed of business; improving monitoring and analysis of process data; creating new business capabilities and innovations; reducing error; and enabling the organization to keep up with rapidly evolving markets.

Considerations for Using AI at Scale

Doing anything at an enterprise scale comes with a set of considerations that should be thoughtfully evaluated, but AI tools pose some new and unique challenges. AI technology processes vast amounts of data, creating increased risk of the intentional or unintentional exposure of sensitive and proprietary enterprise data. AI tools can also produce biased or incorrect responses to prompts, potentially leading to biased or unethical decision making. Therefore with AI, security, privacy and ethical considerations come first and foremost.

Data Transparency: At Laserfiche, data transparency is a cornerstone of our development and operational approach. We are approaching AI in the same way we have always approached Laserfiche features and tools, which are trusted by organizations in the most highly regulated industries, such as government, healthcare, financial services and manufacturing. To facilitate the responsible deployment of AI, Laserfiche is employing a risk-and-benefits framework rooted in leading industry practices for assessing risk and protecting sensitive information to assess the benefits and risks of AI. In conjunction with Laserfiche’s existing data privacy and security initiatives and code of ethics, this framework will guide Laserfiche’s development and use of AI technologies in its products in a responsible manner.

Security: Laserfiche believes that enterprises and technology vendors must implement multiple technical safeguards to minimize the risk that inappropriate use of AI may pose to sensitive data. Additionally, centralized security policies that limit access to data as privacy and security policies permit will be essential to giving administrators fine-grained control over their data.

Adoption: Another important consideration — and possibly the most challenging — is how teams will adopt AI across the organization. AI at scale will require organizations to break down the silos that are currently separating data as well as people and processes to adopt new ways of working and create a company culture that embraces change and innovation. Using AI to transform the enterprise will require new skills, restructured business processes and new ways of communicating so that everyone knows what is changing, why it is changing, and what expectations are across teams and departments.

The Future of AI and Laserfiche

Laserfiche is embracing a new era of computing and productivity — and this is just the beginning of it. We’re excited to explore AI and introduce you to new AI-powered capabilities and innovations with Laserfiche in the coming months. Be sure to stay tuned for more news here on laserfiche.com.

How Banking Institutions Can Use Automation to Enhance the Customer Experience

Banking institutions — including banks and credit unions — place high value on the interaction between customers or members and employees in order to build loyalty and drive business growth. Today, the customer-first approach is more important than ever before, and the digital customer experience is at the top of their priorities. While brick-and-mortar branches are here to stay in the post-pandemic era, customers expect consistent in-branch service as well as a seamless omnichannel experience. Recent BAI research reported that consumers expect 61% of their banking business to be digital and 39% to involve human intervention by 2024. To achieve omnichannel excellence, banking institutions need to provide 24/7 access to services and digital self-service for activities ranging from new account opening to loan applications, as well as an online portal for clients to access their own documentation.

In order to keep pace with customer expectations, banking institutions  are leveraging process automation to enhance human interactions — by supporting customers’ ability to access the services they want when they want them; reclaiming time for employees to spend on value-added activities and customer service; and easing collaboration between teams, departments and branches. Digital workflows and processes are also key to boosting productivity so that banking institutions can take on more customers and add new services without the resource strain or sacrificing quality of service. Here are some of the top transformative process automation initiatives that forward-looking banking institutions are leveraging to enhance the customer experience:

1. Self-Service Portals and Online Forms
Even when digital, incoming applications and customers’ records are often scattered electronically across organizations’ local network drives and individual repositories without a standardized folder structure. Studies have shown that the average employee spends 3.6 hours each day searching for information. When customers are waiting — whether in-person at a branch or online — this translates to longer wait times and decreased satisfaction. Self-service portals with links to online forms where customers can easily initiate service requests or send in information — which can then be automatically routed to the appropriate departments or personnel for approval, or to customer folders — help to alleviate the headaches of manually routing data and shorten processing time, while also creating a 24/7 access to services for customers.

2. A Single Source of Truth: Automated Records Management in a Central Repository
Digitization of paper files is nothing new to banking institutions, however, many of them can take these efforts much further. By establishing a centralized repository, and leveraging process automation tools to auto-file customer information into a standardized folder structure, banking institutions can save time for employees who are able to be more responsive to customer needs since they have customer information at their fingertips. At the same time, automating processes related to customers’ data eliminates error-prone manual tasks, improving accuracy of information. With a centralized repository that has granular access controls, too, banking institutions support information governance and compliance with regulatory requirements. As a result, organizations mitigate the risk of unauthorized access to customer information and build and maintain trust with their customers.

3. Integrate Line-of-Business Applications for End-to-End Automated Solutions
Many banking institutions took a piecemeal approach to digital transformation during the pandemic as a reaction to immediate needs. Today, however, organizations need to assess the technologies adopted over the past few years in order to consolidate and optimize IT investments. Integrations can help to connect the different applications, systems and sites where customer data is stored, enabling banking institutions to create more holistic automated solutions and a complete digital experience for customers and the employees who serve them. For instance, integrations can further reduce manual and repetitive data entry by prepopulating customer information into electronic forms. Integration tools such as integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) connectors and APIs can support organizations’ increasingly complex integration needs. By creating a more connected enterprise, banking institutions can better facilitate information flow and avoid repetitive data entry; provide branch employees with accurate, real-time information; and enable a better, more personalized customer experience overall.

The Member-Centered Digital Transformation Journey

Even as many banking institutions are accelerating digital initiatives, the human element remains the most important piece of the transformation puzzle. A recent survey found that more than 80% of credit unions are prioritizing digital as a competitive differentiator, however, only 14% provide solutions that focus on their members’ digital experience. Banking institutions are at an inflection point, and it’s critical that business leaders make decisions about digital initiatives — whether it’s creating an automated customer onboarding process or implementing an AI-powered chatbot — through the lens of the customer experience.

How can Laserfiche help banks and credit unions enhance the customer experience with process automation?

Check out our banks and credit unions solution page for more information!

Embrace The Game Changer: Transform Wealth Management Operations with AI-Driven Process Automations

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence, or AI, have captured attention and imagination around the world. In fact, AI and its enabling technology, machine learning, have been around long enough to drive game-changing benefits that we already enjoy as clients and staff.

For wealth managers in particular, AI can improve what both clients and staff experience, while saving on operational costs — in effect, better results for less investment. Supporting interactions with AI-driven tools such as automatic form fill, chatbots and automatic documentation filing can streamline operations and reduce the potential for human error. It also frees employees to focus on higher-value tasks such as supporting clients and developing new business. AI-driven automation can improve the top and bottom lines, while helping organizations tighten their compliance programs.

For example, automating client data transfer with robotic process automation (RPA), frees back-office administrators from repetitive tasks such as data collection, data entry and process documentation. Imagine having a cleaner, better-documented process with fewer data-entry errors to resolve, and more time for staff to spend on higher-value tasks such as resolving those errors — or automating more processes. Moreover, making client data available across a wealth manager’s systems also creates opportunities to leverage that information to provide tailored services. The ability to offer clients new products and services at the right time can further improve the investor experience— particularly when wealth managers can offer these opportunities before clients are even aware they need them.

AI-driven process automation tools are already available and can be simple to customize or even build using low-code or no-code platforms. In other words, you don’t have to be a software engineer to get started. The key for advisors looking to take advantage of these tools is to take an incremental approach. There’s no need to do everything all at once—however, it is important to have a broader digital transformation strategy to serve as a guide and to prioritize your efforts in a way that yields the greatest operational impact over time.

Want to learn more?

Download the whitepaper “What ChatGPT Means for Wealth Management”.

Hyperautomation Is The Future, But It Starts With This First Step

By Grace Nam, Laserfiche strategic solutions manager for manufacturing and healthcare.

Hyperautomation started as a tech buzz word but is now influencing leaders as a top strategic technology trend, with many seeing the potential value in leveraging RPA (robotic process automation) and AI (artificial intelligence)/ML (machine learning) to transform legacy processes. According to Gartner®, “ hyperautomation is a business driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many businesses and IT processes as possible”1 It is increasingly becoming a vital part of organizations’ digital transformation roadmaps as a means to achieving digital resilience and agility.

As you dive headlong into hyperautomation at your manufacturing organizations, it is critical for leaders to plan strategies to accelerate processes and deliver value without getting lost in the current technology weeds. After several years of planning and implementing digital transformation and smart manufacturing initiatives, how far do the benefits currently extend at your organizations? Even with recent events and disruptions like COVID-19, supply chain issues, and staffing shortages, 60% of executives say digital transformation is their most critical growth driver.2 Though digital transformation can be difficult as it requires organizations to change culture and traditional structures, digitalization is crucial to the industry’s ability to increase efficiency in production and drive further growth of the enterprise.
Image showing current bottlenecks to digitizing business processes: inadequate budget - 27%; competing priorities - 46%; legacy system limitations to digitizing across the enterprise - 28%.
Note: Percentages are rounded and may not add to 100%.

While disruptions and challenges have stalled out, major challenges with the supply chain and increased operational costs can persist through digital transformation initiatives. Of course, it’s not realistic to expect to eliminate longstanding challenges in such a short span of time. Currently, many leaders share common challenges in justifying ROI for smart manufacturing investment using end results.3 While having access to data is now certainly realistic for most organizations, building visibility into real-time data across multiple databases at the organization remains as a huge roadblock. Siloed data and unstructured data sets, multiple versions of pieces of digital content without the ability to track them — such as sales contracts and datasheets — and the inability to streamline business processes across different applications and departments are just some of the unimproved roadblocks that are still managed manually. When envisioning the end-results of our digital transformation efforts, it may not be what leaders were expecting: It is a common reality that employees are still spending hours on repetitive manual tasks.

Want to learn more?

Download the whitepaper, “Making Automation Accessible, Connectability Universal & Workforces Eager To Contribute“.

1Gartner IT Glossary, “Hyperautomation,” as of 16 January 2023. https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/hyperautomation. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

2PWC Pulse Survey: Executive views on business in 2022.

3SME, 2022 Smart Manufacturing Market Survey.

Don’t Miss Your Connection: Secrets to Connecting Data with iPaaS

What is iPaaS?

In the modern workplace, employees jump from application to application to complete daily tasks. Sometimes, if apps aren’t integrated properly, employees are left with an extra step of transferring information manually between applications to keep processes moving.

While integrations like APIs and pre-built solutions have been around for quite some time, they come in many forms, and are not always standardized. These integrations combined can create a digital ecosystem that is functional, but possibly not the most efficient or organized. This is where an iPaaS, or integration Platform as a Service, steps in. It coalesces ad-hoc webs of individual integrations — pre-built solutions, APIs, and other connections an organization utilizes — into a centralized hub that brings everything together.

As part of our mission to enable digital transformation for organizations the world over, Laserfiche is now bringing the robust set of ECM, process automation and records management features it is known for to iPaaS platforms through a strategic partnership with Boomi.

How does iPaaS work?

We all know how difficult airline travel can be with just one or two connections. Navigating unfamiliar airports and locating the right gate, not to mention the possibility of delays and cancellations can be stressful, exhausting and at its worst leave us so lost that we miss our connection completely.

Now consider your average enterprise organization, with its employees making dozens if not hundreds of connections between applications daily, far more than your average flight. Establishing and maintaining this many connections can be a formidable business challenge, especially for organizations that are short on IT resources.

iPaaS is designed to lessen these pressures on IT by standardizing how applications are integrated into an organization, and subsequently making it easier to automate business processes and share data across multiple applications with increased transparency and consistency.

What are the benefits of iPaaS support for Laserfiche?

As a true enterprise content management system, Laserfiche excels at managing the entire lifecycle of an organization’s content, including documents, spreadsheets, contracts, and scanned images. Consequently, Laserfiche can serve as a backbone for mission-critical line-of-business applications across your organization. In addition, its process automation capabilities can kickoff everyday processes from invoice matching to employee onboarding.

Through a strategic partnerships with Boomi, organizations can now easily connect Laserfiche’s leading enterprise content management system and process automation feature set with all the other applications they run on, creating more seamless business processes for employees and saving them time from having to manually re-enter information as they move it between systems.

For organizations looking to integrate Laserfiche further into their digital ecosystem, these partnerships mean reduced complexity, faster ROI, opportunities to do things they couldn’t do before, and quickly connect Laserfiche with mission-critical systems such as Workday, Epic, Netsuite, ESRI, ServiceNow, and many more.

How can Laserfiche customers get started with iPaaS?

Customers looking to start their journey with iPaaS and other integrations can explore over 140 Laserfiche connectors, including an integration with Boomi, on the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace.

Questions about our partnership with Boomi? Email boomi@laserfiche.com.

Not a Laserfiche customer yet? Check out our homepage for information on product benefits, solutions and more.

Don’t Get Fined: SEC Rule 17a-4 Updates You Should Know About

The First Changes in 25 Years, and Why?

SEC Rule 17a-4 and 18a-6 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which define a set of electronic recordkeeping and prompt production of records requirements for registered broker-dealers, security-based swap dealers (“SBSDs”) and major security-based swap participants (“MSBSPs”), have their first updates in 25 years. The amendments are effective on January 3, 2023.

“The amendments are designed to modernize recordkeeping requirements given technological changes over the last two decades and to make the rule adaptable to new technologies in electronic recordkeeping”, quoted from the SEC recent press release. The most noticeable amendment is adding an audit trail as an alternative stated in Rule 17a-4(f)(2)(ii)(A) to the long-ago adopted requirement to preserve records in write-once, read-many (WORM) format. It eliminates the need for firms to deploy a separate electronic recordkeeping system used for compliance purposes only, which also lowers the compliance cost.

Adding Audit Trail as an Alternative Requirement to the Existing WORM-Format

Firms have the final discretion to adopt an electronic recordkeeping system that meets either the audit trail requirement or the WORM requirement. It should provide a complete time-stamped audit trail to preserve electronic records in a manner that permits the recreation of an original record if it is altered, overwritten or erased; defined terms extracted from the final rule include:
  1. All modifications to and deletions of a record or any part thereof
  2. The date and time of actions that create, modify or delete the record
  3. If applicable, the identity of the individual(s) who created, modified or deleted the record
  4. Any other information needed to maintain an audit trail of each distinct record to ensure the authenticity and reliability of the record will permit the re-creation of the original record and interim iterations of the record

The audit trail requirement particularly applies to final records required pursuant to the rules, in lieu of drafts or iterations of records that would not otherwise be required to be maintained and preserved under Rule 17a-3 and 17a-4 or Rules 18a-5 and 18a-6. Moreover, the electronic recordkeeping system used by the firms must automatically verify the completeness and accuracy of its processes for storing and retaining records electronically.

Other Major Amendments
  1. Eliminates notifying the designated examining authority (“DEA”) for compliance representation before deploying an electronic recordkeeping system under Rule 17a-4(f)(2)(i)
  2. Serializes the original and duplicate units of storage media and dates the required period of retention for the information placed on such electronic storage media, if applicable
  3. Be able to readily download and transfer copies of a record and its audit trail (if applicable) in a human readable format
  4. Uses either a backup recordkeeping system or other redundancy capabilities under 17a-4(f)(3)(iii) and 18a-6(e)(3)(iii)
  5. Provides access rights to the staff of the Commission and other relevant securities regulators to examinate the records via the electronic recordkeeping system

Don’t Get Fined by SEC and FINRA!

The SEC and FINRA continue to levy steep fines on wealth management firms. As recently as 2022, SEC charged 16 Wall Street firms with widespread recordkeeping failures. The firms admitted the facts and agreed to pay combined penalties of more than $1.1 billion. “In 2022 so far, there has been a record year with over 760 SEC enforcement actions representing $4 billion in fines,” says Timothy D. Welsh, President, CEO and Founder at Nexus Strategy, LLC, in a webinar conducted by WealthManagement.com and Laserfiche.

Adopt a Robust Enterprise Content Management System

The Compliance landscape keeps rapidly evolving. It is imperative to choose a comprehensive solution that supports the urge to tackle the increasing compliance challenges presented by SEC and FINRA rules with powerful audit trail functionalities, document and records management capabilities and process automation toolsets to make compliance a breeze.

Want to learn more? Access our Laserfiche Records Management solution page and learn more about how you can partner with Laserfiche to simplify recordkeeping compliance in your firms.

What Can Financial Services Gain from Process Automation?

Financial Services Firms Are Leveraging Process Automation to Drive Growth

Financial services (FS) organizations of all types, including wealth management firms, insurance firms, credit unions and banks are adopting technologies to stay ahead of the game under economic uncertainty. Customer experience and streamlined internal process efficiency are the major drivers of their digital transformation strategies which are critical accelerators of overall growth. A recent survey conducted by WealthManagement.com and Laserfiche found that 88% of the respondents changed workflows as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, especially for customer-facing processes such as adoption of virtual meetings, digital signatures, online client onboarding and processing of new accounts.

Challenges Facing Financial Services Firms and Reasons to Adopt Workflow Automation

Today’s customers look for intuitive, seamless and personalized digital engagement with organizations, whether it’s for new account openings, insurance claims, e-signature requests or wire transfer requests. In a recent survey conducted by Digital Insurance and Laserfiche, findings revealed that 77% of insurers prioritize customer experience in the majority or entirety of their digital transformation initiatives. Moreover, organizations that have streamlined their operational workflows are inclined to characterize their digital transformation initiatives as customer-centric. Thus, a customer’s decision to do business with an organization may be dependent on the robustness of a digitized experience.
Despite this change in customer expectations, many organizations are still having manual, error-prone and labor-intensive processes that drag on employees’ productivity and efficiency, including:
  • Re-keying data onto spreadsheets or across line-of-business applications.
  • Inability to retrieve or recall email conversations with customers.
  • Manual review and approval processes.
  • Manual execution of data analytics initiatives.

Due to these inefficiencies, many employees are swamped with tedious administrative tasks, which can increase the turnaround time for customer requests. As a result, customer service delivery is adversely affected. According to a recent survey conducted by Forrester Consulting, more than half of the respondents believe that their company’s tech stack is outdated and restrictive, which prevents employees from working efficiently.

Real-World Examples of Financial Services Firms Benefitting from Process Automation

How are your peers strategizing to get the most out of process automation? Rehmann in Michigan, a wealth management firm, has been designing workflows across professional service lines in a low-code/no-code approach to streamline data collection and reporting. Using Laserfiche forms and integrations with customer relationship management (CRM) software, information can always be automatically populated when a customer fills out an electronic form, e.g., new account opening. It saves customers’ time, provides accurate information to associates and supports compliance. Amy Flourry, wealth management director of operations at Rehmann, shared in a webinar that they opened 400 new accounts and brought in $200 million in new assets in 2022 alone. “Our biggest problem with [Laserfiche forms]…tends to be keeping up with demand for new ones,” said Flourry.

F&M Bank in Long Beach decided to use process automation in order to meet the demands of their rapid growth and evolving workplace. They decided to go beyond a simple document management solution and transform it into a fully integrated enterprise content management system that included process automation solutions and integrations with their core banking system. For example, they leveraged Laserfiche in most of their loan processes, “the nimbleness of Laserfiche Forms and workflow, plus SQL allowed us to build out an application process for those PPP loans literally overnight. I was not only impressed by F&M as an institution, but I was also impressed with our ability to create literally something out of nothing,” said Morgan Wheeler, business intelligence manager and assistant vice president at F&M Bank.

Customer experience was the major focus of Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group (MSIG) Hong Kong throughout the design of its process automation strategy. MSIG Hong Kong leverages Laserfiche to develop a widely recognized EASY Claims System that helps manage all claims in a centralized platform. It saves more than 200 workdays a year for the claims processing organization-wide, supports business continuity in case of unprecedented transitions and maintains a high level of customer service at the same time. “Claims is only the beginning of our digital transformation. Since implementing Laserfiche, we are looking at expanding to multiple channels, underwriting teams and core business processes to digitize and automate as well,” said Alan Yue, senior vice president of information technology at MSIG Hong Kong.

Benefits of Digital Process Automation for Financial Services Firms

Financial services organizations must be nimble and innovative to digitally transform how they provide services throughout the customer life cycle. One way to achieve digital transformation in such a way is to utilize digital process automation (DPA), which helps eliminate manual steps and improve user experience for customers, employees and vendors. By leveraging electronic forms, business process management and reporting and analytics, key advantages of DPA include:

Avoiding capturing information through error-prone and inconsistent methods: Operation teams receive customer information and requests digitally with metadata in an audited and tracked approach.

Eliminating manual reviews and approvals, lost documents and unknown statuses: Workflows are triggered once requests come in — for example, reviews are automatically routed to appropriate parties for rounds of approval with due reminders.

Spotting bottlenecks of delayed tasks: Get a clear picture of workflows using dashboards so teams can identify where and when delays are happening.

Integrating with core business applications and systems: Eliminate data silos and improve collaboration.

Improving customer experience: Customers receive notifications at each step of their requests, resulting in increased transparency between them and the organization they’re doing business with.

Freeing up time for employees: Enable employees to spend their time on more value-driven tasks and drive productivity.

Archiving information and supporting documents: Bolster your efforts to stay in compliance with regulations and audits using records retention tools.

Scarce IT resources remain another challenge for financial services organizations even if they are ambitious to evolve. Pre-built solution templates help organizations jumpstart automation with less overhead on these resources. Laserfiche users have the ability to get these kinds of templates from the Laserfiche Solution Marketplace, which provides more than 100 publicly accessible, industry-vetted and departmental solution templates for organizations accelerating digital transformation.

Learn more about how Laserfiche solutions help financial institutions drive business growth and productivity.
Download eBook: The Business Process Automation Buyer’s Guide

What Is a Document Repository and What Are the Benefits of Using One?

Having a sufficient document management strategy is essential regardless of your business’s size. A vital element to this strategy is a document repository. Repositories serve as the central hub for all your organization’s vital forms and documents.

Read on to learn more about document repositories and how they help your organization save time and resources.

What is a Document Repository?

A document repository serves as a centralized storage point for all your organization’s critical and day-to-day content. Document repositories are a vital component of your organization’s overall document management strategy and can assist your organization in efforts to ensure that:
  • All content is centrally managed and accessible to all team members
  • Files and documents are systematically organized and easy to locate
  • Your content is safe and compliant with regulatory and security standards

What is a Document Repository Used For?

The main function of a document repository is to centralize all content produced and housed by your organization. Limiting your document management to physical documents is risky and becomes less efficient as your company grows and scales. A document repository eliminates the need for paper and conveniently organizes your documents into logical categories, folders and subfolders.

Document repositories aid in boosting productivity and collaboration within your organization by simplifying how teams share necessary documents amongst each other.

Additionally, many document repositories come with features that make it easier to locate documents, track their lifecycles and set in place security measures to protect sensitive information.

What are Common Features of a Document Repository?

Many document repositories come with a suite of useful features that allow you to boost your company’s productivity, streamline processes through automation and employ the latest security tools. Features you can expect to make use of in a document repository include:

Capture tools: Capture tools assist with bringing data into your document repository. Having a variety of capture tools increases your team’s ability to work efficiently. Some common capture tools include drag and drop, scanning, online forms and mobile capture.

Automation: Document repositories may allow you to digitize manual workflows and automate processes such as naming and organizing files, modifying document security levels and sharing content with relevant team members.

Integrations: Some repositories integrate with third party software your organization utilizes, boosting efficiency and collaboration.

Collaboration tools: These tools improve productivity by streamlining processes that enable your team members work on various projects together. Other useful collaboration tools allow members to collaborate in real time, add comments and share with stakeholders.

Security controls: One of the most important aspects of your document repository will be upholding your organization’s security policies. Document repositories allow you to assign privileges and rights, oversee document access and sharing and employ access restrictions.

Metadata: Many repositories enable you to store details about a document, such as document type, owner, description and date of creation, as metadata. Metadata aids searchability and ensures documents are easy to query.

The Benefits of a Document Repository?

Your organization’s document repository provides many benefits in addition to increasing productivity and efficiency. Here are three benefits of utilizing a document repository:

Systematically organize your content: A document repository gives your organization full capability to organize content to fit your company’s needs. This allows you to create folder structures and naming conventions that work well for your company’s current workflows.

Manage the lifecycle of your content: A great benefit of uploading content into your document repository is the ability to track its digital footprint. This allows you to monitor who has viewed a document, limit editing and duplication and control the amount of time a document remains accessible.

Maintain security and privacy standards: Document repositories allow you to grant specific access rights and privileges to your folders. These security features give your organization more control to grant various teams and departments the appropriate level of access to perform their duties.

Further Reading

Download our Document Management Buyer’s Guide to discover software that will support your organization’s growth and productivity goals.
The Document Management Buyer’s Guide.

Is Your Digital Transformation Just Digital Optimization?

According to IDC, worldwide digital transformation spending is expected to reach nearly $3.9 trillion in 2027.

To put that in perspective, with $6.3 trillion, you could buy 430 million tons of bacon. That’s enough to fill almost 2 million cargo planes. Imagine: With that amount of money, you could make pigs fly.

But while the world is spending incredible amounts of money on digital transformation, research tells us that 70 percent of digital transformation initiatives actually fail. That leads to the question: Why?

Transformation is not just about technology. Contrary to what many software companies may try to tell you, you can’t simply install a new system that will solve your organization’s biggest problems. Or take a legacy analog workflow, move it to digital and consider it “transformed.” Successful digital transformation initiatives are not centered on the technology itself.

What does this tell us? It tells us:

  • Digital transformation is change management. It is changing how we communicate and requiring alignment on our plans and goals.
  • Digital transformation is culture transformation. It is mobilizing and inspiring our workforce.
  • Digital transformation is transforming the human experience. It is reimagining the way we interact with the world around us, with organizations, and with each other.

If we want to look beyond today’s challenges to tomorrow’s opportunities, we must focus on human-centered digital transformation. Human-centered refers to more than just the people within the company. We must think about our customers, our customer’s customers, our partners, vendors, and anyone else who comes into contact with our organization.

Improving process efficiency and productivity is a great goal, but I believe that true transformation should transform the lives of the people we serve.

Here are some familiar digital initiatives:

  • Creating or updating a webpage for your organization
  • Updating an ERP or CRM system
  • Moving digital assets to the cloud

These are some examples of process improvements. They are admirable, but not transformative.

Have you heard the phrase, “putting lipstick on a pig?” It’s like that. No offense to the pig. But it’s still just a pig.

We want to use technology, data and digital transformation to not just improve, but to transform. To disrupt. To innovate.

We don’t to put lipstick on a pig. We want to make pigs fly.

Image of pig with wings.

Digital transformation is about transforming organizations, transforming culture, and transforming lives. And we should view all our digital initiatives through the lens of human-centered digital transformation. What digital initiatives are you currently working on? Are you putting lipstick on a pig, or making pigs fly?

Note: this article was also made available on LinkedIn.