The US Bureau of Labor Statistics defines productivity as a ratio relating output to one or more of the inputs associated with producing that output. An increase in output per unit of input is an increase in productivity. The most common productivity measure is labor productivity, which relates output to employment or labor hours.
According to Gartner Group, documents claim up to 60% of office worker time and account for up to 45% of labor costs; document mismanagement claims 12-15% of corporate revenue; 25% of enterprise documents are misplaced and will never be located; and 30% of Gartner Group clients store more than 50% of their documents on local hard drives or floppy disks.
Increasing productivity in document creation requires less time spent creating and managing each document, which means getting all of these factors right:
Creating The Document
How are documents created in your business? Copy and paste? Built from scratch every time? Or, built from user-unfriendly templates where all the information is entered by hand (even if you already have it in another system) and can't be validated or repeated (so if the customer's name appears twice, you have to enter it twice) or have business rules & logic applied?
None of these methods is efficient or accurate. They are time-consuming, error-prone, and almost guaranteed to create problems further down the line. Input costs are increased, and productivity suffers.
ActiveDocs Opus is designed for efficient and accurate document creation. Copy-and-paste, and build-from-scratch, are eliminated. Users access templates through a web browser and are guided through a simple interview process by the ActiveDocs Opus Document Wizard.
The Document Wizard allows Answers (data) to be acquired from the user or from other systems, and handles all of the validation, repetition, and the application of business rules & logic. Automatically.
Storage, Retrieval, and Delivery
What happens to documents in your business? Where are documents stored to enable quick and easy search & retrieval? Does delivery depend on the user? Do you have robust processes to ensure that documents are stored where you want them, delivered where they need to go, and retrievable in the future for reference, archival, auditing, and compliance requirements?
Enforcing document storage standards in your business allows you to add approval, exception checking, delivery, workflow, and other post-creation processing. Without enforcement, you simply don't know what documents are being created, where they are stored, where they've gone, and how to retrieve them. Down the line, productivity is badly affected.
ActiveDocs Opus is designed to make document creation easy for your end users, ensuring it's the obvious choice for document creation. That's enhanced productivity from the word go, and allows to you take advantage of ActiveDocs Opus' post-creation capabilities to enhance productivity further down the line.
ActiveDocs Opus supports configurable document approval, a final check between document creation and document release to ensure document quality before the document leaves your care.
ActiveDocs Opus supports multiple storage & handling and delivery options to ensure your documents end up where you need them to be. And, wherever you configure ActiveDocs Opus to save documents to, it can retrieve them from. So you can use ActiveDocs Opus as a complete solution out-of-the-box, or its easy integration capabilities mean it can work seamlessly with your delivery, storage, and document management applications.
Fixing Problems
If your business isn't getting documents right first time and delivered and stored where they're meant to be, then remedying problems down the line is negatively impacting your productivity. Your bottom line takes a hit from there, and another hit from any costs you incur from compensation, litigation, or unexpected obligations, that can follow.
In document creation, storage, retrieval, and delivery, ActiveDocs Opus enhances productivity through efficiency and accuracy. Because accuracy is enforced from the beginning of the document process, opportunities for problems are minimized and so are labor costs associated with fixing them. This in turn reduces any impact on productivity.
ActiveDocs Opus supports document regeneration, enabling the Document Wizard interview to be replayed and allowing the user to change any wrong Answers.
Supporting the document creation process
ActiveDocs Opus is designed to help your business create accurate high-quality documents using an efficient process that appeals to your users.
To underpin the document creation process ActiveDocs Opus enables the creation and maintenance of sophisticated templates, data access, and reusable content through the Designer module.
To assist users to create documents efficiently, the ActiveDocs Opus Document Wizard automatically requests the Answers (data) required for the documents, and provides access to external data sources as well as validation, repetition, and rule-based business logic.
Users can choose the template(s) they need to use from an intuitive browser-based interface, the ActiveDocs Opus Express Wizard, which executes the Document Wizard automatically. Alternatively, the Document Wizard can be invoked from other applications via the integration module, ActiveDocs Opus Solutions Studio.
ActiveDocs Opus doesn't stop at making document creation efficient and productive in interactive User-Driven mode. User-Driven document creation can be supplemented with, or completely replaced by, programmatic Automated Mode document creation. Automated Mode allows other applications to generate documents using ActiveDocs Opus Templates via ActiveDocs Opus Composition Server's web services.
All of these features are designed to enhance productivity in the document creation process, with user access to features controlled through role-based security.
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