Document Danger: How Paper Puts Processes and Privacy in Peril

DOCUMENT DANGER: Prying Eyes 

When your organization was first starting out, you were able to get a good sense of the character of everyone that worked for you before you put someone in charge of anything directly attached to money. And back in the days when most payments were made via cashier’s check sent to a specific person in your company, unless an employee was willing to actually make a physical theft, the risk of fraud seemed low. But times have changed — companies now make many of their payments via credit card, meaning that powerful information is splashed across communications to and from your company each day.

When customers send orders via fax, often their private information sits atop fax machines that are shared by dozens of employees. Like the manual entry processes described earlier, and perhaps even more so, discretion does not necessarily scale well — as your company grows it becomes more and more difficult to assure every employee is trustworthy. If documents are left out in the open on fax machines and printers, there’s simply no way to know that one of your employees isn’t taking a peek at a customer’s credit card number or its new product specs, or other private or proprietary information. Your company could ultimately be held liable if one employee decides to fund his holiday bonus with your customer’s Mastercard or cause even more trouble if a competitor obtains your customer’s new product blueprint.

AVOIDING DOCUMENT DANGER

In each of the dangers described above, the risks arise from an inappropriate reliance on people as the means by which to transform customer communications into business information. The problem is, humans aren’t that great at that kind of thing. Humans are inefficient, error-prone, inconsistent and sometimes even dishonest. But they’re also intelligent, empathetic and understanding, which are all vital to your customer relationships. So why not let humans concentrate on what they do best?

In order to do that, you have to remove some of these tasks from their workloads. One strategy that companies worldwide are implementing in order to do so is automating document processes within the enterprise.

Document process automation doesn’t simply mean doing mail merges or getting a fax machine with a big memory cache. What it requires is a commitment to the idea that documents should stay electronic for the entire time they are within your enterprise. If managed correctly, the data residing in them can automatically flow to the appropriate people within your organization and to and from your customer without any duplication of effort.

For example, when an order comes in via fax or e-mail, it enters your company in an electronic format. Even an order that arrives via postal mail, once put through a document scanner, can instantly be made into an electronic file. If the right end-to-end technology is in place, item detail can be automatically detected, extracted and routed directly into all the IT systems that once required a person to manually key them in. Esker DeliveryWare is one example of technology that facilitates this improvement. When a fax, e-mail, paper or electronic order arrives, Esker DeliveryWare captures data such as customer number, product part number and due date for routing and indexing. No predefined templates are needed — captured data is validated and then automatically transferred to applications like SAP (News - Alert) SD for order management. Once an order is fulfilled, a well-automated document process enables invoicing to be deployed via in-house fax boards with the same small effort.

If your company is not large enough to require a full-scale mail facility or to host its own fax boards, there are new options in the marketplace that offer “on-demand,” hosted services. More companies each day are outsourcing one or more dimension of the transmission process, whether it’s accomplished by fax or by postal mail.

One example of a fully-scalable, affordable outsourced service is Esker on Demand. Esker on Demand allows users to send fax and postal mail from their desktop computers or directly from major business applications like SAP or Lotus Notes. Instead of being printed out in the office and manually labeled, metered and mailed by company employees, the documents are printed and either faxed or mailed from a hosted facility in Madison, Wisconsin. Whether sending one or thousands of documents at once, billing managers can send and track critical documents without any hardware investment, giving them an easy way to handle any volume of postal mail and fax delivery, allowing finance departments to concentrate on financial management rather than clerical work. And because the on-demand model allows a no-minimum, pay-as-you-go approach, during times of low volume, companies aren’t paying for unused capacity, helping reduce infrastructure expenses.

Conclusion

With overhead already cut to the bone, the pressure on an organization to shorten business processes and increase profitability is stronger than ever, and shortening document processes can be a highly effective strategy. In all, the key is reducing your organization’s reliance on human hands to do work that could be accomplished with greater speed, accuracy and consistency through automation. The potential costs associated with using expensive, skilled employees for manual tasks combined with the cost of error and even employee fraud far outnumber the costs associated with the technology that can remove these bottlenecks and keep your company away from Document Danger.