There was a time when the average business document design software involved settling on a Word Processor application and ensuring employees were sufficiently trained to use it. How the documents created with that platform were categorized and stored for efficient retrieval was often left to the individual user, or sometimes, when a forward-thinking CIO came along, to a corporate-wide strategy.
However, even when a business has a document design software in place, valuable time and resources are often wasted because the design was not well thought out or lacked the proper design solution for its particular needs.
Every business, from the mom-and-pop novelty store to multinational corporations, needs some kind of business document design platform to ensure all the forms, receipts, invoices, work orders, and a million other documents are consistent.
Most businesses need to review and reduce costs to some extent, because the true cost of document production is often far higher than most realize. In fact, industry analyst IDC* reports that up to an astonishing 30% of the average company’s revenue spent on document processing could be saved. Astonishing, because many businesses are not aware of how much of their profit is being lost in badly designed business forms and documents and the hours spent tracking down reports, receipts, etc. IDC* points to a disconnected document process as a major handicap for investment. And most of that lossage is caused by gaps between back and front office business processes.
A business document design software, in the context of document processing, does not refer to typical graphic design products, such as Adobe®´s suite, but to a software platform used to design business document templates that can be used to generate documents in different formats with flexible data that is constantly changing. Good examples include contracts, insurance policies, bank statements, etc.
When choosing a business document design platform, here are some things to consider:
The best business document design platforms help to nurture and strengthen an enterprise's clients’ relationships by optimizing their Document Output Management and Print Process Management processes. As they are typically part of a larger document process system, they help to enable a business to see and manage the complete document cycle, from the design and generation stage to the actual distribution of the documents and files that constitute the company’s methods of communicating with their customers.
Many businesses have a very ad-hoc approach to document output and printing, and the result is a very high ratio of devices to the number of employees. Therefore, intuitive and flexible business document design software is a major component in streamlining your print output more efficiently, thus saving time and money.
To better understand the importance of agile and flexible business document design, let´s have a look at the some of the main steps of a document cycle:
All in all, it all begins with understanding your business and its document processes. The demands on an office’s document design, storage and output environment are changing as sources of information increase exponentially. The answer is, without a doubt, the right document design software that can be easily expanded with document management and generation features.
References:
André Klein
Freelance DocPath Consultant
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