When seeking to keep your business running efficiently, it can be an overwhelming task striving to remain ahead of the game. There are five consistent benchmarks that all successful companies adhere to and seek to improve in our experience. Keeping up with competitors, increasing your bottom line, and staying relevant in the market can all be achieved easily, as long as you focus on these five key benchmarks.

Key benchmarks for success

Improving efficiency

Businesses that survive their competitors always seek to be more efficient, directly linked to reduced operational costs. After all, inefficiencies can cost a business 20%-30% of its annual revenues. In addition to this, staying compliant both in a corporate and regulatory sense ensures a smooth transition to market.

There are many ways to improve your day-to-day business tasks to be more efficient – and there are many tools and solutions to help you do just that. One of the best ways is by transforming your business from manual to automated processes.

Professionals spend 50% of their time manually searching for information (an average of 18 minutes to locate each document). While this is a time-consuming process, it is necessary, especially for heavily regulated industries. Content management automation helps you efficiently compile, review, and retire complex documents that would otherwise take up a tremendous amount of time. It also allows you to remain compliant with necessary business tasks without spending as much time and resources on them.

For example, manufacturing records books, or MRBs, are imperative in the oil and gas industry. They record the materials, processes, and companies involved in the process of producing specific products. These documents are essential, and they can take weeks or months to compile. To further complicate the problem, customers require MRBs for each order that goes out.

ArkCase has built-in technology that enables easy management of documents from creation through reviews and to end-of-life. What used to be a laborious, error-prone work of keeping track of content changes, is now an intuitive, error-free process.

Improving product quality

When producing and selling products, quality is essential to keeping a loyal customer base. If your standard goes down or is not keeping up with your competitors, the company is in grave danger of losing clients and revenue to its competitors. Giving quality management the attention it deserves can become seemingly impossible when your staff spends their time focusing on manual, unautomated tasks.

Producing and maintaining the documentation required for each project and sale is an excellent example of this kind of issue. Like with MRBs, if you need an excessive amount of staff and time to focus on creating and publishing these documents, quality can easily slip through the cracks. Automating these processes will improve product and service quality, giving you more time to ensure your documentation is accurate, your products are well received, and your customers are happy.

For example, the ArkCase-powered automation process can query external platforms such as SAP to generate a file containing the serial numbers and batch numbers that make that product. From there, the process passes the file to your content management system. After that, the solution compiles the relevant documentation. Virtual links are available to ensure a single source of the truth. If there are any missing documents, ArkCase workflows can be configured to notify the appropriate staff. Not focusing on these processes and using automation means that staff is available for more critical and profitable tasks.

Reducing business, product, or mission cycle times

Every organization undertaking involves multiple processes that make up a cycle. Speeding up any one of those processes increases the cycle’s speed and ultimately how fast your product or service can get to market. Businesses that deliver quicker than their competitors are the ones that ultimately succeed.

Attempting to track and manage your business cycles manually leads to overloaded resources, mistakes, and missing critical information. One example is automating your documentation processes resulting in optimizing these cycle times. Making this point even more precise, Forester stated that companies who master their operations’ automation would dominate their industries.

As discussed in the previous example, ArkCase can automate the document identification and retrieval process. Without this automation, organizations could spend weeks or months tracking down the documentation and assembling it in the correct order. These weeks or months delay the completion of this process which causes downstream supply-chain issues. Deploying automation avoids all of these issues.

Improving control and visibility

Understanding and influencing the way that your business operates enables it to be agile in its approach. Agility allows the company to adapt to changing market conditions more, capitalize on opportunities faster, and appeal to their customers in new and exciting ways.

For industries that rely on large amounts of content, automation does not mean that you lose control over your documentation but instead improves those documents’ control and visibility. ArkCase business process customizations provide a combination of digital processes and tools with which you can optimize your document lifecycle management process. Through this approach, ArkCase significantly reduces the time and resources required for controlled document management processes.

For example, consider that your company receives product requests from two different customers. Each customer has specific requirements that are different from one another. Using ArkCase workflows, you can create a template for each customer that outlines their documentation specifications, preferences, and submission requirements. Using these templates, you can now take advantage of time savings the next time these customers order, improving your submission quality and accuracy.

Continuous improvement and optimization

No business achieves success by remaining stagnant. Increasing the efficiency in your organization is not always about increasing output – you can also cut down on the costs associated with producing those results. Forrester predicts that automation is one of the best ways to decrease operating costs, cutting up to 90%.

Without a significant focus on how you can improve and what areas your business model needs to improve, the evolving nature of work and the increased demand on organizations for reliable document management can crush your organization.

Today, new improvements are constantly available, and new versions often cause your systems and processes to become obsolete. However, introducing new tools, improvements and versions can cause disruptions to your operations and procedures. The intuitive process builder in ArkCase tackles this challenge effectively by enabling you to quickly deploy incremental improvements to your platform with minimal disruption to your people or processes.

The process builder enables non-technical staff to manage business processes, copy existing processes, deploy changes, fine-tune individual steps. This empowers organizations to practice gradual improvements and test different workflows without engaging the IT department.

Over time, businesses that can implement continuous improvement and optimization without disrupting their systems or encountering user resistance will have the edge over their competitors. In essence, minor, continuous improvements gradually add up to make a big difference to any company’s bottom line.

Why consider ArkCase for your document management needs?

Organizations that work with documents that follow a certain workflow can look to automation as means for improving productivity and reducing costs. Proper automation in document and content management can result in up to 90% savings for the organization’s operational costs, document and case management team.

ArkCase is using tried and tested commercial, off-the-shelf solutions to enable such automation and savings.

For organizations that have documented, repeatable document lifecycles, ArkCase enables non-technical staff to construct these workflows. A set of business rules can be set up so that the document is tracked from creation to retirement. Along the way, ArkCase’s process builder enables organizations to construct notification mechanisms, keep incremental track of changes, and create an auditable track of every activity around a document.

Workflow hygiene that is fully automated helps organizations stay compliant with government regulations, but it also makes the workplace more productive..

If you’d want to hear more about how ArkCase can help your organization’s needs, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’d love to hop on a call with you and discuss your document management needs.