PDF as a Smart Application for Case Management
Across many industries—from finance to life sciences to energy—the amount of content you deal with on a daily basis for each business process is growing. Not only that, but it’s becoming harder to manage. Take a look at these eye-popping stats:
- Unstructured content is growing exponentially. Organizations are seeing 20% year-over-year increases in the volume of unstructured content—emails, images, word processing documents, faxes, scans, etc.
- Content is driving enterprise processes. At the enterprise level, up to 80% of operations are triggered by and resulting from unstructured content.
- Content management costs are growing.Managing the content is becoming costly. Today, organizations spend 5%-15% of their gross revenues on handling content.
The modern workplace has experienced an explosion in document creation and information management. No business process—from content classification and archiving to regulatory submissions—is spared the onslaught of information. Where does all this content go, and how can it be managed effectively? Enterprise content management (ECM) systems do a good job of improving the processes and infrastructure, but they don’t do much to address the actual content.
From Print-to-PDF to Advanced Rendering
In order to deal with the volume and complexity of content requirements within business processes, companies need a method of compiling divergent file formats into a single standard format that doesn’t rely on native authoring tools. Organizations need to automatically connect disparate information from various departments and project groups, and take the onus off of the end user. In addition, what organizations need is context: how do the documents relate to one another, what is the end user to do with them, and what is the next step of the document lifecycle?
While digital content increases, the demands on organizations to effectively manage that documentation increase as well. This is where the PDF file format—an often overlooked standard—can play a role to help improve access to information.
However, basic PDF conversion alone is often insufficient to meet an organization’s needs when it comes to content management. With the many versions of PDFs available, simply pressing the print-to-PDF button is a sub-optimal solution—controlling hyperlinks, maintaining layers, converting legacy formats, optimizing for mobile and other key features are often absent in these basic solutions.
Getting on the Same (or Better) Page
The perfect PDF goes well beyond a high-fidelity document rendered to look exactly like the original. Focusing on the aspects which can help improve your business process efficiency and the enhancements which can optimize the case management process are all part of Advanced Rendering technology implementations.
Compound documents. Composed of multiple files in a business process, compound documents need to be organized in a way to ensure ease-of-access for the reader. Combining multiple files into a document is no easy task especially when the source material could come from hundreds of sources and represents tens of thousands of pages.
Document enhancements. Automating the addition of enhancements such as headers and footers, watermarks, digital signatures, table of contents and bookmarks can make the compound document more usable and expedite information sharing. An automated table of contents derived from file information is a great example of improving or enhancing the compound-document process.
Automated metadata. Metadata provides information about the meaning of content, offering a way to provide context, to simplify categorization and to describe relationships between various data elements. Not only can the system metadata be applied to a PDF to expose key information for end-user context, a metadata-driven rules engine can automatically send your documents to the next step of their lifecycle based on specific properties such as document status or author, and apply predetermined rules such as watermarking a file which is in draft status with a draft stamp. This improves the underlying business process and facilitates more effective case management.
The Case for Advanced Rendering Technology
Advanced Rendering technology, document-to-PDF software specifically for the enterprise, addresses core content issues and is a critical component in effective case management.
Advanced Rendering can improve business processes as far-ranging as document on-boarding through email, claims submissions, contract processing and other document-centric workflows. It uses a powerful rules engine to apply metadata to automate document workflows that reliably enhance business processes and apply specific instructions at the document level. In addition, Advanced Rendering enables organizations to merge various documents into a PDF, add enhancements, assign priorities, leverage/expose/maintain metadata and much more. With Advanced Rendering, the document is more efficiently found and searched through optical character recognition (OCR), thumbnails can be created for effectively identifying the correct documents and file sizes are optimized for easy collaboration over email or mobile.
Business process management and case management workflows are enhanced with Advanced Rendering, giving end users the tools they need to find the information they require. While the PDF standard is often overlooked, when implemented effectively through Advanced Rendering technology, it becomes a powerful tool used to improve case management and business process management.
For more details on how Advanced Rendering can improve business process efficiency, download the white paper “Advanced Rendering: Optimizing Business Process Efficiency Through Document Transformation” from the Adlib website.
Adlib is a leading expert in Advanced Rendering technology, automating high-fidelity PDF conversion across the document lifecycle to enable the world’s largest organizations to improve the efficiency, quality and control of document-intensive business processes.
Together with a diverse partner ecosystem, Adlib supports more than 5,500 international companies and government organizations, helping them minimize the financial exposure and risk of non-compliance with regulatory agencies; reduce IT costs by centralizing document conversion; and leverage document-to-PDF as a shared service across the enterprise.
For more information, visit http://www.adlibsoftware.com, email info@adlibsoftware.com or call 1-866-991-1704.