Getting the Most Out of Your Data and Documents
It is no secret that businesses produce lots of data, documents, and forms throughout their organization. Being able to use the documents and forms that are either created or collected by an organization—and use them together with their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)/line-of-business application—is no easy task. Compiling operational live data or historical data to offer deeper insights into business health and provide complete data to users is crucial to being more efficient. Removing the need to search and hunt for data or supporting documents is how businesses continue to see high-level growth.
Now, if we look deeper into the business, there are two things users need to do their jobs: data and documents. When working with the data, a usable format like Excel is a must. It allows the user to have the supporting drilldown data with links to the documents at their fingertips. Data is powerful by itself, but when we add in the documents that support it, it provides users even more powerful insights and brings a new level of productivity.
Aside from users, managers, executives, and decision makers today not only need views into the data but also the documents that support each of the data use cases. As we discussed earlier, data paired with documents creates deeper, actionable insights into data stories, bringing more value to your data and your content strategy. This starts the transformation process of taking data from an expense to an asset within your organization.
Content Intelligence for the Business Intelligence World
The concept of content intelligence is more than just another buzz word; it streamlines two different types of analyses into a singular, more holistic approach to corporate performance management, and it is starting to build momentum in today’s business use cases.
Content intelligence is most often used inside your corporation’s digital transformation strategy. Businesses that are determined to keep up have a lot to consider as they seek solutions to assist them with their digital transformation visions and content intelligence strategies. These technologies can be utilized to modify or replace existing business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business requirements.
In other words, every company’s digital transformation is unique to its own existing processes and structure. Business leaders can spend an enormous amount of time looking for niche solutions designed for their vertical, but this isn’t always the best method to use. A better approach is to use a flexible, proven solution that can help streamline integration and minimize the learning curve of adapting to digital processes. As your business changes, your business intelligence (BI) solution needs to be able to adapt to those changes and grow with you.
Why Is Content Intelligence Important Now?
Now more than ever, companies must be competitive and, in some cases, need to run lean to be able to provide the product and services that their customers need. Inside organizations there are lots of valuable nuggets that can be used alone but bringing them together can provide higher value to tell stories about the business.
What do every business have in common? Content, Documents, and Information. These are the fuel that keeps a business operational, which is why business leaders exploring options for their own digital transformation should seek a flexible solution and/or key solutions partner that allows them to handle their content more intelligently. Within your business intelligence strategy, you can implement a content intelligence strategy. Businesses can adopt a solution that can be modified to fit every department across their organization, making it the perfect first step to kick off your digital transformation journey within your organization.
Business intelligence, document management, and security solutions are the catalyst to an organization’s digital and content transformation strategies. With these strategies, companies are using the data off the documents they are collecting, using AI and machine learning to automate the capture of documents, and extracting the data for use in an ERP or to create reporting databases for data-rich reporting capabilities that didn’t exist in the past.
Here are a few common use cases where you might see content intelligence used in an organization:
AR Department
Incoming order documents and capturing order data in an automated fashion. This gives you directional data that allows you to know what needs to be ordered or in some cases what you have too much of.
AP Department
Invoice Exception reports from your ERP connected to the captured invoice documents. This allows visibility into what your company cash flow is and will be.
Shipping Department
Linking signed BOL/Pack List to the order and invoice data. This allows your business users to be able to get greater insights to make decisions faster.
Over the past few years, there has been the addition of forms management into the content intelligence arena, which has allowed organizations to have not only data-driven reports with documents linked together but also interactive data with workflows. Forms and workflows bring content intelligence to the next level to help support compliance and regulatory efforts you may need to enforce in a process. Being able to have the data routed to someone to review or update data can save your business valuable time at the user and IT levels.
Work Smarter Not Harder
There are many different strategies a company can employ to help drive their organization to the next level. But why not use what you already have in your hands? Connect your content, documents, and information together to drive your business to the next level.
To learn more about what content intelligence is and how it can help your organization, and how some of our other business solutions can work together in your digital transformation journey, please reach out to the experts at Fortra. We’ll set up a business consultation or live demonstration to show you our content intelligence solution.
