Document outsourcing

Paper and digital documents are the lifeblood of many organisations. David Lowe offers six tips for FMs who want to get to know their document processes

29 September 2011
   
Your business is a living organism. Its vital organs are the divisions selling your products and services, supported by teams processing the orders, paying suppliers and providing customer service. Powering all of this activity are your documents – the organisational bloodstream.

Without the information and continuity provided by the flow of documents, whether paper or electronic, the organisation would die as surely as a body does when starved of oxygen. This may surprise anyone to whom ‘document’ means no more than a yellowing sheet of paper imprisoned in a filing cabinet. But it’s essential if organisations are to understand the critical importance of how they outsource their document processes.

Win the paper chase
By approaching your document outsourcing strategy with a refreshed outlook, facilities professionals can consider the sheer scale of documentation in any organisation. Just by walking the floors of an office, it is easy to notice just how far documentation, and related workflows penetrate every working day of every employee’s life.
Whether the document is sitting on a computer, printed out, or even presented to clients in glossy brochure form, the document is still the core method of formal communication between individuals in a team and 
between companies and their consumers. In a recovering market, the value of bringing control to these disparate activities and applying them to your business goals has never been so important.

1⁄  Business processes
It is essential that forward-thinking organisations consider how business processes are powered by information and document management. The document process is the business process. By understanding the lifecycle of a document – how the document enters the company via mail and email, moves into the workflow of a particular division, 
is processed and finally moved 
into archive or sent back out 
to customers and suppliers – 
you have started the journey towards understanding how effectively documents are used 
in your business.

2⁄ Choosing 
the important processes
What is your company trying to achieve in the next three years? Make more money? Produce the next killer product? Save your clients more money while maintaining your margins? These are the hard questions you will ask of your business when aiming to identify the core business processes you need to optimise. Whether it is to improve your supplier payments or to design punchier marketing collateral, you will need to engage on a deeper level with your document management processes, and prioritise the areas that need most attention.

3⁄ What does ‘good’ look like? 

Now that you have recognised the value of the document process and have prioritised the processes that need most attention, it is important that you run a gap analysis. Benchmarking with other businesses, or even seeing what the competition is up to can help, but ultimately an evaluation of ‘what good looks like’ against 
your three-year strategy can 
only be answered by you and 
your colleagues.
Document outsourcing can save your organisation money, or generate new revenues via the installation of clever communications processes. It is important to recognise that some parts of your document enterprise are working better than others.

4⁄ Stakeholders
These processes are likely to have further reach than initially expected. This isn’t a bad thing, merely something that needs identification. Who uses the process versus who supports it? These are likely to require multiple stakeholders in 
your business, from process 
owners – such as marketing – 
to support functions such as IT. 
All of which are housed in the facilities maintained by the FM community. Everyone is affected, so teamwork here is essential.

5⁄ Understand the costs

Our research has shown that, depending on the industry, an organisation can spend up to 10 to 15 per cent of its revenues on document management activities. The more manual the processes, the more costly it can be to a business. Optimising these processes with a carefully considered strategy and plan will dramatically reduce the impact of this cost. Leaving these document processes unaccounted for can expose the organisation to costly inefficiencies. So consider for a moment, what kind of business would leave a cost 
of that magnitude unbudgeted and uncontrolled?

6⁄ Transform your business
New ways of working are having an impact on every part of our lives. The onset of new, increasingly portable digital technologies, married with the growth in the flexible knowledge worker community means that, in the future, document outsourcing service providers sector will be paying more attention to collaborative working. It is important to future-proof your outsourcing, allowing for a world in which the proliferation of information has an in increasing impact on working communities. As teams are becoming more virtual, so too are the processes you are aiming to outsource.

David Lowe is UK director of Océ Business Services