Greg J. Schmidt
Greg Schmidt is a 23+ year veteran in data, document, forms, and process automation. Specializing in document and forms automation, accounts payable and receivable automation, intelligent document capture, business intelligence, and more, Greg has helped hundreds of companies automate their data and document processes and streamline their cumbersome business processes through strategic technologies and planning for digital transformation.
Greg has a passion for helping customers achieve best practices for implementation and solution expansion within their organization so that operations are as efficient as possible.
Greg also has over a decade's worth of experience in IBM i report and data distribution and robotic process automation technology.
For more content from Greg on leading document management and business intelligence topics, you can visit his youtube channel.
Q & A with Greg
What’s the most interesting or impactful project that you’ve had the chance to work on, whether it's with a customer or internally developing products?
I would say my involvement in developing our AP automation suite. Specifically, diagramming out the solution according to what customers are needing. That includes having capabilities like intelligent capture processes that use AI and machine learning technology to capture and extract data off the documents and then plug that information into the full solution.
And then I’ve helped decipher how does that information make a contribution inside of a workflow for PO and non-PO approvals and using the core solution and our Webdocs Invoice Manager process to help complete that automation process and configure it to their business needs. I’ve tried to design the suite so that we’re not just putting a solution in place that’s going to solve a small problem, but rather, solve the larger problem and maintain adaptability as the business grows.
What would you say is the biggest barrier holding customers back from strengthening their document management?
A lot of customers that have been in the business for a long time might think that, since they’ve gotten along fine with their manual processes, there’s no need to make upgrades. In these scenarios, I always look at them and ask myself “How can I turn them to our side? What can I show them that makes their life easier with our solution?” With these customers, it’s my job to educate them on the multitude of ways that they can benefit from implementing our solutions.
When we're going through the demonstration, we're also showing them other capabilities of the solution like dragging and dropping documents or scanning technologies or other ways to capture documents. So there’s a lot of teaching that has to go into winning over some of these customers that are more resistant to change. And the educating continues even after they’ve purchased the solution. We want to make sure they have every opportunity to make their organization as efficient as possible using our technology.
What sort of improvements have you seen customers experience after implementing Fortra’s document management software?
People resources are hard to come by nowadays. And we work with a lot of organizations that tell us that the automation functions of our solutions are giving their employees their time back. Before our solutions are introduced, these employees were being drawn into performing other activities that take them away from performing their true job.
So they're able to use our technology to eliminate these inefficiencies and refocus their team. Whether it’s an AP automation process or a reporting process or just general document management or forms processes even, we do the heavy lifting for them. We see this boost their overall productivity and morale, since they’re no longer being asked to perform mundane and repetitive tasks.
What changes do you foresee in the world of document management in the coming years?
Well, there’s a number of changes. But first and foremost, I think there’s going to be more of an emphasis placed on the security of documents. Organizations are becoming more aware of the cyberthreats that exist and want to make sure their critical documents are being securely stored. Also, they’ll want to make sure that their documents are not only safe from cyberthreats, but also physical threats as well. Companies that are using thousands of filing cabinets to store their documents are waking up to the reality of how risky of a practice that is in this time where we can’t afford to lose data – so there’s more an emphasis being placed on digitizing documents and storing them electronically.
Compliance and regulatory mandates are changing the landscape too. The regulations that organizations have to abide by relating to how documents are stored and workflow processes and such are becoming more stringent. So these organizations need to exercise compliance in who is handling documents, what is being done with them, and so on.