It is hard to be 100% paperless, but what is stopping many organizations from at least reducing — if not completely eliminating — their dependence on paper? Often, the roadblock is a document management system that isn’t integrated with other essential business platforms such as accounting software and email.
Workers live in the applications that are most relative to their jobs and give little thought to how documents such as invoices and customer correspondence are captured, managed, and archived. Therefore, for any document management technology to have a shot at successful adoption, it has to be seamlessly integrated with a company’s core business systems.
In the case of Carubba Collision, an autobody repair company based in Buffalo New York, the firm needed to synchronize its accounting software and email system with a document management solution to accommodate rapid growth. The goal was to maintain a high level of customer service in assisting customers with insurance claims without adding staff. The solution: integrate DocuWare’s document management and workflow solution with the firm’s QuickBooks accounting software and Outlook email system. This brought together three separate applications working in synch behind the scenes, beginning with storing and accessing information and culminating in a seamless process for the user, which is the type of integration that always needs to happen if document management software is to be successfully adopted. Carubba continued to keep customers and staff happy — i.e., enabling staff to easily search, send, receive, and upload invoices and other documents from within familiar programs while delivering better service and clear, timely communication to all customers.
“We’ve eliminated a couple of hours per employee per week by getting rid of manual, paper processes,” said a spokesperson from Carubba Collision. “It’s hard to accurately measure how many hours we’ve saved, but the bigger benefit is that we’ve been able to add more stores and grow our business without adding operational costs such as more accounting staff.”
While accounting and email integration are central to the successful implementation of document management technology, many organizations also run complex business processes with SAP or Microsoft SharePoint which also require document management capabilities. The goal is the same. Users should be able to focus on their familiar and trusted applications while connections to storage functions take place in the background needing little input from them
DocuWare’s individual integration options make various functions available — for storing, searching, synchronizing, and importing — using many applications. DocuWare solutions work with any company’s unique infrastructure. With 12,000 customers and experience integrating more than 500 unique applications, DocuWare has delivered benefits like those seen by Carubba again and again.
Whether it is a standard business application such as email or a more complex solution, no software exists in isolation. Modern IT ecosystems require real symbioses and dependencies among many solutions for a variety of tasks. Any addition to the IT stack — particularly document management technology that provides the foundation for employee productivity and successful customer and vendor interactions — should have interoperability from the beginning. If it is too difficult to integrate with the core business, document management will get the short shift or — worse still — users will just ignore it, thus compromising their business efficiency in a digital world.
For more information, visit https://start.docuware.com/integration.