Unifying Your Approach to Digital Workflow Transformation

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Unifying Your Approach to Digital Workflow Transformation

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Introduction.The business world today is demanding a new set of organisational skills and competencies. This includes the ability to embrace remote work, be more agile in working with information across regions and cultures, and adopt new ways of working that will make a noticeable difference in digital transformation and organisational performance.

But achieving meaningful transformation is difficult to do with a piecemeal approach to solutions and workflow. Too often, disconnected systems and information silos inhibit efficient teamwork and constrain process improvement. Duplicate solutions, multiple vendors, and disconnected strategies drive up costs, increase complexity, and boost the risk of inefficiency.

Process improvement is also encumbered by many business users and process owners struggling to get the level of IT support and focus that they need to effect real change. Often, better solutions and approaches are known, but unrealised, because of conflicting IT priorities and departmental budget constraints. The result is an environment that, despite all good intentions, fosters chaotic performance overall versus the kind of agility and acumen that organisations need to remain competitive today.

What is needed is a more holistic approach to digital workflow transformation that focuses on common and essential workflows that drive the performance of the organisation every day. This is enabled by an integrated low-code platform and a unified approach to the entire transformation effort; empowering citizen developers to drive digital agility, minimise financial investments, and eliminate months of waiting for a solution.

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Information and Innovation in EMEAAll industry sectors across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa are undergoing a digital transformation. As digital technologies increase productivity, improve efficiency, and uncover new opportunities for success, organisations of all kinds—from pharmaceuticals to manufacturing—are all looking to transform their workflow, increase information agility, and develop new digital-first strategies.

But where are the opportunities and what should you do about them? A Market Intelligence Trends Survey conducted by M-Brain provides some compass points to consider. The study surveyed business managers located across key cities in Europe and identified key technology trends that will impact how information management systems will be developed over the next five years. Data capture automation, information analysis and cross-function integration are at the top of the list.

Companies must implement systems to capture information in real time, so as to proactively identify and respond to emerging market opportunities and threats faster than the competition. Over 80% of the survey respondents said that systems should be able to automate data capture.

With the ever-pressing variety and amount of information to manage, 91% said that automated data analysis is a top priority. In fact, 78% of the EMEA business managers surveyed considered this to have a largest impact on their activities in 2021.

Connected cross-function systems are also a growing priority for EMEA business managers. Most companies today use separate systems to serve their different information management requirements. Almost two-thirds (64%) expect information collection and analysis to be integrated with other organisational functions in the future.

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Aiming for the Future The workplace is demanding more document intelligence, better process orchestration, and increasingly connected systems that bring all the process players together in ways that spark innovation, promote improved service, and gain superior organisational performance. And while there are a great many technology solutions to consider, the greatest opportunity is a strategic one. The COVID-19 crisis highlighted the weak points in many information management strategies and forced organisations to recognise their vulnerabilities. Indeed, the pandemic elevated the importance of effectively managing information assets to a strategic priority, worthy of C-level focus.

This is illustrated in our recent AIIM Industry Watch Report for 2021 which found a disturbing gap separating information management strategies and C-Suite strategies. The findings should be a wake-up call for organisation leaders everywhere.

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Organisations are losing the battle against information chaos and need to rethink outdated manual approaches to information management.

Organisations are being overwhelmed by the volume, variety, and velocity of information they must manage. On average, people expect the volume of information coming into their organisations to grow 450% over the next two years. They expect more than 57% of this information to be unstructured (like a contract or a conversation) or semi-structured (like an invoice or a form). It is the convergence of these twin forces—information volume and information variety—that creates information chaos and makes true Digital Transformation so challenging.

The way that workers view their jobs, and the tools and systems they use in their activities, is changing. As a result, a piecemeal approach to document management is no longer adequate to ensure that teams function at peak performance and employees feel effective and competent in what they do. Users no longer accept the complexity of the past and now expect an “easy-as-an-app experience” whether they are working remotely or in the office. According to AIIM research, 55% of successful process automation efforts are tied to these factors of organisational performance and workflow experience. Organisation failing to transform will quickly become non-competitive.

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The C-Suite is failing to align business and technology strategies.

A holistic approach to digital workflow transformation will require, in many cases, a change in C-Suite mindset. Overall, respondents in the AIIM survey give their organisations a disturbing grade of “C-minus” when asked how well they align information management and executive business strategies. Indeed, 46% say their alignment between IM and business strategy is either “poor” or “needs improvement.” Why do so many IM practitioners give their organisations such a failing grade? A total of 66% say that a lack of budget, resources, strategy, and leadership are their biggest obstacles.

Now more than ever, organisations must develop the ability to embrace rapid change, spark innovation, and drive superior results. Empowering the business units with low-code solutions and approaches to digital workflow transformation help crush complex business processes that drive up costs, reduce speed, and increase risk. Ensuring an organisation’s competitiveness ultimately comes down to how well you can transform and orchestrate key business processes to eliminate a continued reliance on paper, digitise the workflow, and integrate with existing and legacy internal platforms.

Where should your attention go? Nearly 40% of organisations are working to automate processes that cross the intersections of people and technology.

The top processes identified for transformation include customer and account onboarding, financial activities like accounts payable, and service-oriented activities like call centers and claims processing. Increasingly, low-code solutions and techniques are seen as an empowering approach that allows front-line employees to build solutions faster, with minimal support from IT, and squeeze even more from exiting platforms that improve productivity and user experience.

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Organisations need to increase their investment in critical competencies.

According to AIIM research, 75% of organisations say that getting the right information to the right person in context is a problem. This is made more pressing by the recent trend toward remote work. A new level of connectivity and process agility is a must in order to remain competitive, and organisations are looking for ways to quickly adapt and transform. Organisations can move forward productively by focusing on these critical competencies:

Create, Capture, and Share Information – This competency includes multi-channel capture, remote team collaboration, process orchestration, and connected systems. Cognitive capture helps bring structure to vast amounts of unstructured data residing in everyday documents.

Digitise Information-Intensive Processes – There is still a great deal of opportunity to transform key business processes to eliminate a continued reliance on paper. For many, the greatest benefits are gained by automating common activities that are traditionally paper-intensive like human resources, accounts payable, or case management.

Orchestrate Process Improvement – The greatest opportunity for process improvement is found at the connection points between systems, people, and departments. Orchestrate digital workflows in collaboration with users, systems, and data.

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In the Real WorldDigital workflow transformation is essential today, not only to survive current marketplace disruptions, but also to remain competitive in the future. A powerful factor for success is to focus on process improvement as a catalyst for transformation.

Kofax, a market leader in intelligent automation solutions, partnered with Czech Republic-based Meopta to accelerate their digitisation efforts. Meopta’s success in automating accounts payable processes provides a real-world example of digital workflow transformation and how organisations can benefit by being more connected, intelligent, and orchestrated across information systems, people, and process.

Use CaseHeadquartered in Prerov in the Czech Republic, Meopta is an international company that develops and manufactures world-class optical, opto-mechanical, and opto-electronic products.

Meopta focused their immediate digital transformation efforts on their accounts payable processes, working to automate and streamline activities to boost efficiency, cut approval times in half, and avoid a 30% increase in accounts payable (AP) staffing. “Eliminating repetitive, time-consuming manual work is about more than driving

savings at the bottom line,” said Radim Klasek, CIO at Meopta. “Harnessing automation means we can free our people to spend more of their working days on rewarding, value-added activities – giving us a key advantage in the marketplace.”

Meopta has cultivated an extensive network of suppliers, and the company now processes more than 40,000 invoices per year. Since the volume of invoices are growing by around 10% year-on-year, the company felt that the payment process was an ideal testbed for a new automation strategy. Meopta selected a solution based on Kofax TotalAgility that provides document capture, business process management, robotic process automation, analytics, and eSignature capabilities on a single platform. The results have been impressive: 50% faster processing time, 30% cost-avoidance on extra AP personnel, and a future where Meopta is poised for more competitive performance over a number of key activities.

“In the long term, our goal is to move more processes from paper to digital systems,” says Klasek. “We are well on the way to becoming a lean, future-facing enterprise.” The company plans to extend the AP workflows to include its U.S. operations, and to design additional approval workflows for everything from travel and sales orders to order processing and legal contracts.

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Moving Forward Now more than ever, organisations need the ability to embrace rapid change, spark innovation, and drive superior results. Success requires a more holistic approach to digital workflow transformation, unleashing a new set of empowered employees, sometimes called citizen developers, to expand their influence and impact on workflow and systems. Competitive advantages will be found by extending workforce capacity across all critical workflows to maximise agility, improve performance, and deliver enhanced experiences for customers. Look for partners and providers with the right mix of capability, expertise, and vision to make the most of your digital transformation efforts.

Kofax Inc.15211 Laguna Canyon RdIrvine, CA 92618United States

[email protected]

The Kofax Intelligent Automation Platform harnesses six key capabilities to drive customers’ end-to-end digital workflow automation:

Cognitive Capture: Convert unstructured data locked in documents into structured assets containing actionable information.Artificial Intelligence: Extend your workforce by applying cognitive services to think, act upon, and interpret data.Task Automation: Deliver end-to-end automation of time-consuming routine, repetitive, and manual tasks with RPA.Workflows: Digitally transform high-volume, rules-driven, repeatable workflows by automating processes.Ecosystem: Deploy a network of technologies and services that operate within an open, integrated architecture.Integrations: Eliminate complexity and time needed to build and support integrations to connected systems.

Kofax solutions helps organizations transform information-intensive business processes, reduce manual work and errors, minimize costs, and improve customer engagement. They combine RPA, cognitive capture, process orchestration, mobility and engagement, and analytics to ease implementations and deliver dramatic results that mitigate compliance risk and increase competitiveness, growth, and profitability.

For more information, contact us at [email protected] or at www.kofax.com.

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