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All too often, businesses accept document handling challenges as necessary difficulties and close their eyes to their negative effects rather than working to do something about it. The problem grows because as companies grow and databases or paper files fill, the amount of material becomes too much for anyone to handle, making it easier to brush the matter under the rug.
That’s all well and good until your tangled pile of documents causes compliance or security issues that severely harm the company financially or its reputation. Making use of enterprise output management software can take the pain out of document management; here are some of the challenges businesses face when it comes to their output management.
Challenge 1: Language Barriers
For businesses with international offices, customers, or vendors, language issues can arise quickly. For example, your ERP can likely accept and store all types of documents in many different languages, but when you finally locate it and pull it up, how much time do you have to spend translating it into English?
Depending on the document type, you may find yourself hiring business translators to determine exactly what had been agreed to. However, your misinterpretation of a document in another language could lead to expensive international settlements or lawsuits.
You can avoid this when you integrate automated document handling that parses the documents the moment it arrives and translates it into the appropriate language for you.
Challenge 2: Different Systems
While SAP may be the gold standard ERP, not everyone uses it, and many are still using outdated legacy systems that might not be compatible with your own. In this situation, you are stuck analyzing and storing documents manually because they are unrecognizable to your system or they arrive in paper form. In addition, large document databases and filing cabinets are hard for everyone to keep track of.
For example, if sales want to pull all past purchases from a group of clients that bought a certain product from one region of the world, they would likely need to comb through 1000s of documents to find these customers in a typical pdf database or filing cabinet.
With a top-of-the-line enterprise output management solution in place, all of that information would be available for search, and they could locate the customer documents they want in minutes rather than days.
Challenge 3: Tracking Versions and Consolidating Documents
Other common challenges regarding document handling are version tracking and consolidation. In a typical database, a company handbook might be named by the date it was updated, but what happens when that data is entered incorrectly? It becomes much more difficult to find the version you are searching for.
This is an especially big problem when it comes to customer information because that type of information often comes in piecemeal with each interaction. If you are creating a new document each time with new information, gathering data on a full customer profile becomes next to impossible.
Seal Systems’ document labeling systems including stamps and watermarks allow you to monitor which version of any document is being used at any given time.
Choosing an Enterprise Output Management Solution
SEAL Systems offers the most secure automated document handling. We’ve already thought of all of the challenges you could face with documents and other output, so you don’t waste time searching for things and always have the data you need in your hands.
Contact SEAL Systems today to find out more about how our document-handling solutions can improve your processes.