Collaboration is key in any workplace. And as more organizations embrace remote working, teams need a way to come together to work on documents. Telework brings with it some challenges when it comes to your document processes. Since your team can’t physically pass around documents for approvals and signatures like in the office, you need a way to keep your workflows going. And while shared drives seem like an easy solution for digital documents, they can be hard to maintain, access, and secure. But with document automation and an electronic document management system (EDMS), you can easily collaborate thanks to secure, standardized workflows and remote access.
What Is Document Automation?
Document automation is the process of using data, often from ERPs and line of business systems to create documents like purchase orders, invoices, ship notices, checks, and even more. Using automated workflows, you can easily route your documents for approval from key stakeholders.
This is done by using an electronic document management system. An EDMS allows your team to store, manage, and retrieve documents for authorized users, often providing search functionality, mobile document access, document distribution, and editing functionality. With an EDMS, your team no longer must rely on physical filing cabinets, paper, or a manual approval process.
Securely Collaborate From Anywhere
With employees working remotely or in scattered geographies, they need to be able to access documents from anywhere at any time to conduct business. An EDMS gives you the centralized document storage you need for your content. Whether that’s static content like invoices and purchase orders, or dynamic content like forms, webpages, and emails, your employees will be able to access everything they need from wherever they are. But centralized access is only half the story. When you can access your documents from anywhere, you need to make sure everything is safe and secure.
An EDMS helps you securely collaborate by keeping your confidential documents safe from being accessed or edited by the wrong people. Version control prevents unwanted changes from being made to your documents. With a check in/check out process, an EDMS gives you visibility over everyone who has made changes, as well as what changes have been made. And you can further control access by setting permissions for specific employees in your organization with different user rights to author, revise, view, route, or delete documents.
Optimize Your Approval Workflows
Document automation isn’t just a way to make working with documents easier, it’s a way to optimize your workflows to work smarter. If you don’t have a standardized process, your documents can easily end up in a mess. Document automation kicks off the process by automatically capturing documents like invoices or reports from email the moment they reach your inbox, right into an EDMS using automation techniques like optical character recognition (OCR).
Once the data from the document is captured in the EDMS, the routing process is automatically triggered, sending stakeholders everything they need for approval. Document automation gives your organization the ability to view, route, and sign off on documents digitally. Letting you streamline your routing processes for faster approvals—from anywhere.
Document automation with an EDMS gives you the standardized workflows and secure processes you need to ensure your team members can work together from anywhere. And no matter what your remote workforce looks like today or beyond, utilizing an EDMS can help your business work more efficiently with your document processes moving forward.
Get Started with Document Automation from Webdocs
Webdocs is an EDMS that lets you manage all your documents and data with a complete, integrated solution. Request a demo to see how easy it is to get started with document automation.
