Most companies take great pride in the products and services that they offer. But they often overlook the one thing they spend more time producing than anything else: the Document.
Of all the processes today, the document creation process is one of the most extensive. It touches nearly everything: internal communications, customer relations, sales, legal compliance and much more. From emails and letters (yes there are still lots of those) to reports, budgets, sales presentations, sales proposals, contracts, invoices, regulatory filings. The list of examples is endless.
It’s not just the sheer numbers. Today’s documents are more complex. For starters, they are more visual. The average document has increased significantly in size because of the regular addition of graphics and photos. With so many more companies operating internationally, documents today must often be adapted for local concerns.
Because of increased regulation, the legal language in documents has become more critical. This is a major challenge for any legal document creator. A typographical error repeated across scores of communications can expose an organization to legal repercussions.
Consider some of the real challenges that are faced in everyday document creation:
- The marketing department for a medical device manufacturer creates sales presentations and customer facing emails. For each region around the world, the branding is slightly different. So are the pictures and the compliance language that must be part of every communication.
- An insurance provider that manages communications on sensitive issues to millions of customers. To do that efficiently and effectively, it needs to make sure that the letters adhere to a common look and feel and include the relevant legal disclosures.
- An engineering firm that regularly bids on complex projects needs to ensure that the timelines and job estimates it puts in proposals reflect the most up-to-date and accurate data – without requiring skilled engineering personnel to spend time checking and formatting the information.
Accomplishing these and other tasks requires a well thought out document creation process. That’s a relatively new idea for most organizations. After all, it wasn’t that long ago when most documents were handwritten or produced on a typewriter. Or creating a brochure or a marketing presentation required the use of specialized graphics programs. With so many documents, and so few tools for getting it done, the idea of document creation automation seemed impossible.
Today, applications such as Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Apple Pages or Google Docs make it easy for anyone to create professional looking documents.
But technology introduced a new set of problems for the document creation process:
- While it was easier to create a document, it was also far easier for employees to spend far too much time trying to get the format right. In the 1980s, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, a Silicon Valley company, issued a ban on PowerPoint for that very reason.
- Brand consistency can suffer—documents produced by two different departments can now have a highly professional look but appear so completely different that you might not know that they are from the same company.
- Many companies try to exert top down control over the document creation process, implementing systems managed by the IT department. This creates consistency, but at the cost of responsiveness and resources: it could take an already over-burdened IT department days or weeks to make required updates, holding up a sales effort or another critical process.
We take the process beyond static templates, delivering interactive document creation.