Boost In-Office & Remote Work Efficiency – How to Go Paperless in ALL your Departments (Video)
If you’re a Dynamics 365 BC or F&O, Dynamics GP, AX or NAV ERP user, you can go paperless to eliminate manual paper processes, and your business documents can be wherever you are. The modern workplace means every department – from accounts payable to human resources to legal – needs to be able to communicate, collaborate, and do their best work from anywhere, not just in the office.
In this recorded webinar, you’ll learn how DocLink’s integration with Dynamics ERP can help your company digitally manage your documents and data, and automate processes in any department, such as:
- Accounts Payable – invoice processing including 3-way matching, audit prep
- Accounts Receivable – invoice, supplemental documentation delivery
- Field Service – mobile capture, service calls
- Human Resources – onboarding processes, access & delivery of employee documents
- Legal/Contract Management – version control, electronic signatures
Find out how DocLink can help you go paperless to streamline your business processes, improve productivity and make sure your company can be successful no matter where your employees are working.
Transcript below:
Melissa: Hi, everyone. This is Melissa from Encore. Thanks for joining our webinar today. It’s Boost In-House & Remote Work Efficiency, how to go paperless in all your departments. So today, we’ve invited Peri Lynn and Mark from Altec to show you DocLink, the document manage and process automation solution that’s integrated with your Dynamics ERP. So we’d like this to be an interactive session so we encourage you to type any questions you may have into the question pane and we will address those at the end. In addition, we’ll be doing a little bit of polling to help engage and better understand your needs. So with that, I’m gonna turn the webinar over to Peri Lynn to get it started.
Peri: Thank you, Melissa. I sure appreciate that. Well, let’s take a look at what our roadmap is for today. So I thought I’d cover a couple different concepts on why even contemplate going paperless and then we’ll review what I like to call some of the DockLink fundamentals and then we’re gonna take you through a couple different examples of how you can use DocLink all in your company today. And then we’ll sprinkle in some customer success stories as we go about our business here today. But let’s kinda start things off by our very first poll, because I’m really curious as to what brought you to today’s session. So, let’s see. Melissa, can we initiate that first poll? And then I’m gonna ask all of the audience out there today to please participate. And that way, you’ll not only get to express what’s going on in your organization, but you’ll be able to see if there’s a little bit of a trend amongst all of your other shared companies that are out there listening to today’s information. All right. So what are the biggest challenges working either in office or remote? Is it about accessing those critical documents and the information or is the issues more centered around manual and inefficient approval processes? Or it may be that you’re struggling having to compile everything together, in order to send out to someone whether that’s either you’re emailing it out today, or even compiling paperwork, it could be that invoice processing and expense reports are really costing you a lot of angst and it could be that you have other areas in the organization. And if you pick other, maybe chat back to us and let us know, kind of what that other area represents. So Melissa, let me come back to you. And let’s take a look and see what’s going on in the poll. Did you get some responses?
Melissa: I did. Yeah. So really, it’s spread pretty evenly across the board, except for C, nobody answered retrieving and collating backup documents for delivery, but A, B, and D, and E, kind of evenly spread.
Peril: A, B, D, and E. All right. Well, then let’s kind of dive into all of these different areas and we’ll kind of show you how DocLink can provide greater visibility and management of documents, and of course, then all of the transactions as well. And thanks for reporting back on the trends. All right. Melissa, so here’s what I’m thinking. We had reached out to Gartner and they produced a report based on what’s happening on organizations today and what’s happening in terms of companies returning to work, or remaining remote and so it’s interesting to see that 74% of companies are going to make a permanent shift to more remote work that has slightly different implications across the board. But the point is, is that we need as organizations to be agile in our access to documents, and joining documents to the right people in the process, and really enabling the remote workforce to have access to the information to do their work. And that’s not gonna change, we’re gonna see that continuing to expand you know as we move forward. And that’s really why we wanted to talk about DocLink today and share with you how you can use DocLink in order to enable your organizations to have that very easy access to documents, restricted by security, of course, so only the right people have access to the right documents, and you can now connect everything digital connecting the right people to the right process to the right document and really achieve the business goals that you are having at hand today.
So let me introduce you a little bit to DocLink and what DocLink can do. And so DocLink as a product is all about connecting the documents with the process, right, in order to streamline operations, and deliver documents out to the right people, and that can be either internally like an approval process or externally when we start talking about delivering documents to customers as well. And then I wanna also share with you how DocLink works. This is really fundamental, because if you understand how DocLink works, then it makes it really simple for you to apply these concepts to anywhere in the organization. And that’s part of the beauty of DocLink is that truly is an enterprise-wide solution. So even if you came today to learn more about maybe accounts payable, once you understand how it works, you can transcend all areas of the organization on wherever people are experiencing paper based bottlenecks. So let’s kind of look at these fundamentals. So step number one is, what is that document? And how is that document produced today? And if we understand those questions, then it makes it very simple to deploy one of the technologies to capture that document. Now is that document coming in via email? So we can grab it right from email, or maybe even layer on some sophisticated OCR to grab not only the document, but the data, right off that document? Is it produced in your financial accounting system, we can grab that automatically today, as well. So there’s a lot of possibilities in terms of capturing documents. And then once we have that document in DocLink, now we can do something with it. So the next question is, how does that document move in your organization today?
And by that, we’re looking at the using DocLink, workflow engine, which is a highly configurable, very powerful workflow engine that can route that document, sometimes even leveraging rules, maybe by dollar amount or vendor through a particular approval process. And then that leads us to the next question is does it need to impact your ERP or financial accounting application? There’s a great two way sync, so it’s all about not only pushing the document and the data into your ERP application, but if you make changes, then it also can tie that document back and you can also view the document right from within that financial accounting application as well and also view the document in DocLink in many different ways through the desktop application, through the web, through mobile. So it really gives a lot of agility in terms of accessing documents. And then way down there at the bottom, not maybe as much of a focus today, but we can absolutely collate documents together and send them out automatically. So whether that’s on the purchase order side out to a vendor, maybe joining that up with some supporting documents, or more traditionally, on the accounts receivable side, and we’re sending out invoices to customers, and the magic is joining it up with supporting documents. That’s what kind of that win is there. So that really gives you the bird’s eye view of how DocLink works.
And now we’re gonna dive into how it works in these different business processes. So let’s cover accounts payable first and then we’ll go into all the other areas. And you might wanna know like why? Why is it that we always start in accounts payable? And I think it’s simply because there’s so much paper or documents in accounts payable and those documents need to travel around the organization for the purposes of approval. So why should we bother automating AP? Well, number one, it’s about self-service document access, you know, in allowing approvers to have easy access to allow vendors to even have access to a portal if you like, and really drive time savings by eliminating the filing routines of paper-based documents, or attaching out to a network file share and also minimizing data entry. And then of course, that all dovetails into the strategic win for your organizations which is usually about saving costs or growing without having to add headcount. Okay? All right. So let’s take a look at a traditional accounts payable process. So if you just think for a moment about what you’re doing an AP today, it might look very similar to this where an invoice comes in and then of course, you’re maybe opening up the mail unless it’s coming in through email, you might be physically matching it to the purchase order, you might be then routing it through the approval cycle, maybe applying some codes if it’s a non-PO based invoice, checking against budget, it comes back to AP and you’re physically doing the ERP entry, etc., etc., etc. Right?
Now, what would it mean to your organization if you could really collapse this process and really no longer have to do every single step in a manual way, but leverage technology to make this automated and much more efficient. So this is what we’re suggesting is that with DocLink, you have an opportunity to really remove a lot of the steps in the process and leverage automation in order to be able to achieve those and then, of course, really drive productivity in your organization. So when we think about the benefits, we kind of think about, well, it’s all about not only eliminating the paper, right, if some people are still dealing with paper today, but it’s more about looking at the actual process and driving efficiency in the process. So if you are doing a rubber stamp, and writing coding information on documents, that goes away. If you’re routing documents through a manual kind of email process, we’re able to automate that and make it much more visible to the end user and make it easier for them to do an approval and have that continue on in the approval process. And we’re, of course able to easily push that information into your financial accounting application and that’s an out of the box integration and that’s really powerful as well. So what I wanna do at this point is let’s transition over to Mark and have Mark take us through what does that look like? What does it look like from the end user’s perspective? And he can hit on some of those highlights for you. So I think Mark, what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna hit the button to change presenter so I’m doing that right now. And so now you have been made the presenter and hopefully that will give you an opportunity to showcase your screen, and then take us through kind of a little sample demonstration. All right. So right now, your screen, we’re actually seeing a blue background and a chat window. Ah, now we see, DocLink. There we go.
Mark: Yeah, I misclicked that button, which is super important to actually show what you wanna show, right? So, I appreciate that. And as we talk about that process what I wanna demonstrate is DocLink’s ability to really work with the ERP and that could be anything, it could be Dynamics GP, AX, NAV, SL, it doesn’t really matter. DocLink integration is really across the board on the dynamics side, it’s a pretty comprehensive bi-directional integration. But when we talk about the AP automations, really it’s we wanna digitize first. So the capturing of documents, there may be different documents we wanna capture along that process, purchase orders, packing slips, invoices, physical check, but digitize that and DocLink is really great at taking all those physical documents and making them digital. So what I thought I’d do is start with a purchase order. Now this process really doesn’t change because the PO entry lives in GP. And I’m using GP as an example, but again, we talked about all the other ERPs that can be integrated into DocLink seamlessly, the process stays the same from an end user and the only difference is there’s no physical printing of that purchase order. We still go and print, we just choose a different printer. When I go to that process now, GP, MCs Xavier, those of you who are familiar, they should go through a few steps here to choose that printer. Okay, that’s great. We choose a special printer that digitally captures that document in the DocLink and if we click on print. That takes that document that print tool goes over to the DocLink and captures it automatically. So the end result is a digital document with all the metadata that we may have had to manually type in along the way if we were doing this, you know, storing documents as a file system on a S-Drive or something like that, or dealing with that physical piece of paper. And we have no visibility into that metadata. Well the DocLink has all that for us. So with a click of a button that print capture brings that document in and all the metadata now lives on the side. All these property values are searchable, retrievable and we’re actually gonna use this in future steps to do an actual three way or two way match with a packing slip comes in and we receive it, add that PO number on it quickly index and bring that packing slip into the digital repository. And when the invoice comes then we can utilize the same information to do that matching again. So when we pull in the invoice, we can actually do automated freeway matching. So if PO number 2110 for one line item, 10 widgets at whatever cost matches with what we received, an invoice comes in with that exact amount, boom, hundred percent through a match, completely automated throughout that process.
A lot of documents are gonna do that, they’re gonna automate all the way through 100% match. However, if they don’t, which is you know, real life. We’re going to stop that process and during the invoice as it gets pulled in and onboarded, OCR is going to read that invoice and all the data that comes from it. Now, let’s say it was off by a little bit, we have in this case, PO number 2084, we don’t find a match anywhere, it throws an exception, it sends an email to the user, user comes in here, and manages that exception. Same thing all the way down to the line item level, which is really cool. We can go back into the ERP information. So we have the PO data, we have what was received on the packing slip. And let’s say, for example, we were billed 10 times as much for that line item than we were supposed to, well, the system is going to notice immediately stop that document from being automatically processed. And we can see what it’s doing behind the scenes and say, “Great, we’ve deviated from what we expect by 10 times,” and it’s gonna throw an exception and the user is gonna come in here, fix that do whatever you do, to get the correct invoice, maybe just throw it, throw it out, go back to your supplier, and get a new invoice that’s actually accurate so we can do that match. So really powerful stuff, high level of what OCR can do. But really the main idea here is, these are all clicks and matching of documents, physical paper that you no longer have to do. OCR is really doing that heavy lifting, and that’s a cliched word and I hate using it, but it makes the most sense that, taking data and validating it with what’s already in the ERP, that’s your vendor number of vendor names, phone numbers, so on and so forth. Other data that dynamics, so think invoice number, date, total amount, line item information, it’s intelligent enough to know that, “Hey, invoice pound is the same thing as invoice number, INV pound,” whatever it is, now let’s circle around that area for that invoice number that’s most likely that invoice number. Well, this can be floating on the page anywhere it could be over the top left, bottom left, we have some intelligence into this. So it’s a smart capture functionality that doesn’t necessarily matter. It can be anywhere on the page and the system is smart enough to realize, “Yep this is our invoice number, grab it, here’s our date, grab it.” Again, data that you no longer have to manually enter it which is just gonna save you a massive amount of time while going digital at the same time.
What happens next? Well, those documents flow into a flow process. So if let’s say we have a non-PO based invoice, if there’s some dollar value limits or we need to send it out and decentralize it to department heads for approval, we can do that throughout the DocLink workflow. This is really just a mimic of your business process. Now again, we talked about the PO matching, we’re gonna automate that and import it directly into your ERP behind the scenes without you really having to do anything. So there’s not really a whole lot to show there. So I wanna focus on this approval process to give you an idea of the power of auto routing digital documents first and why it’s important in a system like this to save you a massive amount of time. First of which is what we call a distribution stamp. This is really mimicking the payables transaction entry screen where really we’re creating your vouchers for those invoices in the ERP. We’re gonna automate all, bring all that data forwards and OCR did this for us. We don’t have to reenter that, that’d be a waste of time. So DocLink is gonna pull forward all the data that we care about, we’re going to put a default value based on what ERP data we have to automatically geocode this. Now we could distribute this out more if we needed to, you know, not all invoices just have one line, they could have 2, or 10, or 20. Well, DocLink can add as many lines as you want to distribute that out as well. When we’re done this coding process, we can automate this to send to the correct approver the first time without even having to think about it. Think of taking that physical piece of paper, walking it down the office or, you know, scanning it, sending an email out to someone, well, all that goes away with DocLink, because what we can do is just single click auto route. DocLink is gonna look at any of the property values that we care about, and direct that document in a second to the correct approver instantaneously.
Now we wanna make sure that that approver isn’t gonna be sitting in DocLink just waiting there, that would be a waste of their time. So we can send an email notification out to that user stating, “Hey, you have some documents waiting for you. Go ahead and take care of them.” It could look something like this, where and actually, as we’re talking a document has just come in for us. So that’s how quickly an approver gets that visibility into those documents. Right? So no bottlenecking of documents, those documents instead of sitting on someone’s desk waiting, maybe they’re gone for a week out on vacation. Documents are now visible within DocLink, within email so users are instantaneously notified are waiting for them so, they could click into a workflow so they can do their own geocoding if you do it that way. They could just simply approve or deny documents directly from email. So a single click literally cannot be any easier for them to approve or deny documents, which really alleviates that bottlenecking of the documents sitting on a desk. So you might actually be able to take advantage of early pay discounts and certainly, you should be able to remove all the late fees that you may be paying today with those documents being bottlenecked. We can also make sure that a document if it’s overdue, we can notify a user if it is overdue, let’s say if it’s sitting for 24 or 48 hours, new auto escalations of those documents or set them as priority when a document comes in, auto extracting via OCR to say, “Hey, this is a priority documents over $100,000, you need to take advantage of that early pay discounts market is priority, right?” So pretty easy approval denials to move it on. And once those documents have been approved, we really can take it from there and import it into the ERP to create that transaction. And we’re gonna work seamlessly with the ERP to create those digital transactions within the ERP without having to double enter data. That’s gonna save just another massive amount of time with DocLink doing that seamlessly for you. And on top of that, we can one click find and recall those documents from a handful screen depending on your ERP.
So I go in GP additional view documents, so this is unique to DocLink, to find and recall that document directly out of the secure document portal that is DocLink. If I need to make any changes, DocLink is also going to take all those changes and update that document automatically. So you don’t have to go back into your filing digital file repository, update that data that you may have changed for whatever reason, DocLink is gonna do that automatically for you. So lots of touch points that DocLink is just going to streamline that process for you, and just save you a massive amount of clicks and a massive amount of time. So you’re probably wondering, how did we go through this so quickly, and it’s a whole basically from start to finish AP automation and DocLink makes it super easy and streamlined. So we were able to go through from start to finish, when a document was first on boarded all the way to import in that transaction man to the ERP in about, what? Two or three minutes? That’s really the power of DocLink of going from a paper world into a paperless world and adding some automation on top of that. So something to chew on as you’re contemplating AP automation. Hopefully that gives you a good visual into what DocLink can do for you. With that, I’m going to change this back to Peri Lynn and she’s gonna talk more about going beyond accounts payable.
Peri: Oh, thanks, Mark. I appreciate that was powerful stuff. So I get excited every time I see our demonstrations because I think really at the end of the day, it is about helping companies achieve their strategic initiatives. And generally those are gonna be around cost savings and increasing profits overall. So thank you for sharing that. I thought that that was exceptional. All right. So let’s now transition into, how does it impact other folks in the organization, and what does it mean if you’re an accounting manager or a controller? And why is this beneficial from your perspective? And when we’re sharing this information, if you are not the accounting manager or controller, and you’re having to sell up in your organization to say, “Hey, listen, I think that there are things that we can do to really take action in our organization and provide better automation,” then you can share with them why you think it would be important from their perspective. So we’d like to kind of share what’s on the accounting manager and controllers plate, right? What’s of interest there? It’s all about visibility and reporting so they can meet those cash goals, about improved accuracy. So they’re not having to do rework, right, the employees are not having to do rework. And then of course, chasing exactly what Mark brought up. Can you now transform AP and go after those early pay discounts or avoid late fees? What would it mean in your AP spend, like look at the overall AP spend? And just look, what if you could get 25% of an early pay discount? What would that mean? So there’s a lot of questions that you can start asking yourself that will really help the organization overall. So let’s dive into a couple of these different areas. So when we talk about visibility and reporting, and how DocLink can help in those areas, really talk about being able to monitor workflow statuses. So as a manager, if you’re trying to better manage the overall workload between employees, you can see, you know, who has what documents. If you’re needing to take a transaction and move it more quickly through the process, then you have the ability to do that as well. There is a wonderful cradle to grave lifecycle of all that’s happened within the document, from the moment it is arrived in the organization, as it’s made the way to what Mark just demonstrated all the way through coding approvals into the ERP. From the payment perspective, all of that is tracked. So you know, what’s going on with that document and the transaction.
And it really is all about visibility and control of for reporting perspective. So if you are having to fast track invoices in order to hit those financial goals, and you have that opportunity to do that as well. Here’s a nice did you know, and I think it’s important to take a step back. Now, for those of you that are here on the phone with us today you already are kind of seeing the need for a solution. But did you know that it was 20 bucks just to file one single document, and $120 to retrieve a document? And then if you had to recreate a document, it’s $220. So just think about that, because we’re not just filing ones and twosie documents, generally you’re filing numerous amounts of documents, or having to go back to the filing cabinet, or some kind of network file share to retrieve a document, and if it’s not there, then you have to kind of figure out all right, where is it in the organization? So imagine that you’ve got documents at your fingertips and based on your security, you have access to all documents that you need in a very, very fast way. So that would really transform the organization. All right. Let’s kind of talk a little bit now about the other side of the equation, so this is on the quote to cash side. And we’re gonna focus the demonstration I think more on the AR side of the house. But let’s just take a look at this. So when we talk about DocLink, we talk about it as an enterprise-wide solution and I showed you in the beginning how to think about document management in a holistic way, what’s the document that tells us how we can capture it. It doesn’t need to travel through a workflow for some kind of approval. It doesn’t need to impact a transaction and who needs to search and retrieve it. That’s the big picture. So think about this particular side of the house where maybe your organizations are originating a quote out to a customer. So we can capture a quote, and automatically send that out to a customer, maybe it needs to accompany some kind of drawing, or some other kind of documents. So that’s another possibility of delivered and then that customer PO is coming in. So we need to capture that and maybe put that through some kind of business process in order to validate that what’s on that PO is actually something in inventory, and then that’s to be moved over into the sales order module.
So you see, all of this is possible with DocLink, because we’re just kind of using those four powerful questions, in order to capture it, put it through a business process and impact a transaction and then do, off you go to search and retrieval. So I wanted to focus on the accounts receivable side of the house simply because that’s another strong area and another very popular area where people focus for DocLink. And when we talk about AR, it is about automatically capturing that AR invoice, having other backup documentation in DocLink as well. So at the right time, you’re easily able to get those documents collated, and systematically send them out to the customer. So it’s infinitely faster, rather than having to do it on a one-by-one basis and then find that backup documentation, attach it in an email and send it out and then do the same thing over and over. So systematically doing that is an exponential kind of speed factor in the organization. And so we have a fruit and beverage actually manufacturer and so they deployed DocLink on the AR side of the house as well. And they were able to cut down their AR processing time by 90%. So the whole goal for them was growing without adding additional staff in that particular department. So I think it’s really really powerful and looking at not only that they rolled it out to AR but then they also of course rolled it out to the AP side of the house and here we are seeing evidence of that extendibility side of things. I think the big win for them is that they had a strong need to not only send the AR invoice but they had a lot of supporting documents that needed to be sent with that AR invoice so that’s really the big win there. All right. Let’s continue on. So let’s kind of take a peek at what does that mean? It’s fine and well when we’re able to kind of explain, with our words, what that looks like, but I wanna have Mark be able to show you exactly what it’s gonna mean, as the end result, what does that look like from an end result of being able to magically have those documents joined together and viewable by your customer to allow them to pay faster? So Mark, let’s take a look at what you’ve got prepared for us on the AR side of things.
Mark: Absolutely. And I thought based on the original poll, that although automated delivery and collation would be important, just to show the extensibility of DocLink, but also, since no one really said that was important for them, right now. I wanted to also pivot and say, how about one of the other options to show the, you know, finding important information quickly. So I’m actually gonna do two components, I’m gonna pivot slightly, if that’s okay, to show both, to show the enterprise wideness of DocLink, as well as how documents are now at your fingertips. So really looking at the that AR invoicing, so think of billings, right? We have invoices that go out on a regular basis, all those are gonna be sent out, as invoices regularly once a week, every couple of weeks, whatever it might be, well DocLink can capture that, just like we saw the capture of a purchase order using the exact same tools we utilize for purchase orders. So they’ll print, you know, print it out, and DocLink is gonna that invoice, and then automatically route it based on some metadata it might be an email from the customer that’s already in the ERP and manage that way. Well, DocLink is going to batch all these up, it’s going to grab additional documents, we call them supplemental, but could be really anything that’s your, original customer PO. It maybe it’s linking to the customer. Well, DocLink is gonna automatically grab all this when I do that trigger point, which is just printing the invoice and then batching it all up and sending it out. So what the end result is, is that we’re going to, let’s just pretend we’re a customer real quick, we can actually grab that customer invoice, attach that document for our customer, grab any other documents that relate, we have a customer PO that just came in via email. So we drag and drop that message file in Outlook right into DocLink. We keyworded it with a customer number soo it gets into DocLink and that document becomes an automated process along with the invoice to say, “Great, here’s that customer PO that you sent us, so that’s why you’re getting this invoice.” It’s just a proof of why you’re getting billed.
Any other document can be linked. If we, you know, maybe there’s a statement or some other document, we can attach that automatically, that’s documents in DocLink through this process as well. So I know it’s not that important for everyone on the webinar today, but I just wanted to show you that anything outside of AR, other documents could be delivered this way for your customers. And beyond that if we see here, we can actually utilize DocLink as a customer or vendor portal. Imagine your customers or vendors being able to go to a portal, download their invoices directly that way, just create visibility. Have you ever had a supplier or a customer call you up and asking for your documents and you spend a bunch of time trying to find them? Well, now they can do self service within DocLink and we can secure those documents for individuals so they can actually do their own stuff. Now beyond that, I wanted to just show what it looks like from a search ability and grabbing that important information quickly. This is the DocLink portal, it’s any user is gonna have access to that, and depending on permissions you’re going to have different users have different roles. So we saw workflow, being able to search and retrieve documents. So your physical filing cabinet is now brought down into this one single portal and now documents are at your fingertips. We can search and retrieve by really anything, different companies in the organization, however many you have, any documents, think beyond AP here, your contracts or any, you know, barcoded documents, purchase requisitions, HR documents inventory, whatever it might be, that can be stored into DocLink. And I can search and retrieve by literally any property that we’ve captured along the way.
Think about how long this would take you to do this, what I’m about to do but I’m gonna search on invoices in the system. We’re going to switch the operator to say, “Hey, I wanna find everything in the system with an invoice number greater than $10,000. So all we have to do is find our invoice number document total. There we go. Greater than $10,000, and search, right? So imagine going to your physical filing cabinet and doing this. It’s almost impossible because you have to look at every single document in every filing cabinet and now try to do it over a certain date range, right? Now we wanna go back by exactly one year, so go back to October of 2019, it was a simpler time before COVID, all the way to today and search on those documents, right? Again, this would be nearly impossible. And you may have to find your documents and iron them out, you pay for that. They bring your documents to you, you pay for that. All your documents are now immediately available for you. We can search and retrieve in about two seconds to find exactly what we want. Super powerful stuff, right, and it’s all there for you. So yeah, delivery can be great. But really search and retrieve is first and foremost, going to be hugely beneficial, and really necessary when you go digital. So something to keep in mind along with delivery as you contemplate going paperless. All right. With that, I’m gonna send you back to Peri Lynn one more time for her to finish it off here.
Peri: You got it. And I’m so glad that you were just talking about kind of the power of search and retrieval and what it means to have documents at your fingertips because that’s one of the number one questions that I get is, can you restrict who has access to what documents? And the answer is yes. And that becomes more and more important as we’re working remote and needing to have one place to store everything in the organization, but then separating it based on security. And I always think that HR is a great use case of that kind of metaphor, if you will, so that maybe only the folks that need access to documents can have them or you’re restricting access based on employees. So in order to illustrate that, let’s kind of talk about one of our customers. So this is Econo Supermarkets, they have five stores in Puerto Rico, about 600 employees and about $110 million in sales. Right? And they’re the largest supermarket chain in Puerto Rico as well. And they specifically chose DocLink to help with their AP and of course, HR automation. And there’s lots of things that they can do. But here their challenge was is that they had paper everywhere and they were also moving facilities, and they simply didn’t wanna take the paper with them. So for them, HR is what they call a just cause jurisdiction. And so they needed to create and manage so many different documents for each of their employees. So for them, they did kind of like two major integrations. They did, of course, HR and AP. In HR, they also wanted to kind of track things like resumes, and applications and benefit forms, and W-4s and I-9s and reviews and payroll stuff, just everything. Right? And so DocLink enabled them to capture everything in that set repository. So also, once they were up and running in HR, they were able to deploy it in AP, I think we’ve talked enough about the AP kind of side of the house, but it does also articulate that extendibility of the solution overall. And then lastly, we thought we would also cover a little bit on contract management. This continues to come up in nearly all of the conversations for companies that are trying to go paperless and automate business processes. So when we talk about contract management it’s simply yet another example of where you can use DocLink in your organization.
So number one, it is in the storage of those signed agreements. So that may be kind of the first step into this foray of document management. And by having all of those documents that allows for you to easily search for those documents. Now, here’s where we get into some of the extended functionality as well, because you can use things like full text search. So rather than searching by a particular document property, you can now search the entire context of that particular contract. In addition, if you want to use DocLink in conjunction with DocuSign, now you have the ability to route documents out for signature using DocuSign and then bring them back in as well. And then of course, there are also some contract template features that you can utilize, going after, again, not having to repeat data entry over-and-over. So there are lots of possibilities. The question really comes back to you as an organization. What are you doing for your contracts today? Where are they being stored? What are the business implications of you doing it manually, right, and this is something that you would wanna kind of look to technology to help solve. So we thought we would dive into some of the kind of extended features of the software and just really start helping you see where else this can be applicable. So one of the top features that we talked about is version control, and this not only has implications in contract management, but can also have implications in other areas of the organization, where it’s really important that you’re tracking that version over version change of that particular document. Okay. So let’s take a look at what it looks like to do version control. So in this case, we have you know, are looking for a various document and we can see quite clearly what’s happened with this document, over, and over, and over, who checked it out, when it was checked back in, you know, what version of this document is now gonna be uploaded for complete use within the system?
And then, of course, there’s also that digital signature. So this is showing you a little bit of a snippet of what we mean by that DocuSign integration. So the storyline is really as simple as this with DocLink and DocuSign, you would have the ability to have that documents stored in DocLik, it’ll be sent out using DocLink, DocuSign is going to capture the signature line of that particular document. And then you’re able to bring that signed document as well as the certificate of signature back into the solution as well. So really just extending the value overall of the application in and of itself. All right. So what have we talked about? We have talked about a lot of different things, not only about how you can use DocLink on the AP side of the house, in either the generation of a requisition through the creation of a purchase order, capturing that purchase order and sending it out to the vendor, allowing DocLink to be used as a vendor portal, the onboarding of that invoice, all the way through the transaction, and then search and retrieval, and then we also just took a look at HR, extending it to HR, and then contract onboarding and version control and looking at some full text search and some of those other kinds of things. And there’s so much more that DocLink can do in your organization. So it really keeps going back to those four questions, which is, where are you feeling the most amount of paper-based bottlenecks in pinches in your organization? So what are the documents that we’re worried about? You know, do they need to go through some kind of business process or workflow? Do we want it to impact a transaction? And then ultimately, who needs to search and retrieve those documents? That’s the simple version, but it obviously can be more complex as well.
All right. So let’s do our last poll, and then we’ll kind of wrap it up for today. So question for you. So Melissa, if we can initiate our poll questions, that would be fabulous. And so everyone will see the poll opening up now and then please play along. We’re curious to know, kind of where in your organization are you feeling that you need to drive business process efficiency? So let’s see if there’s any trends in kind of what we’re seeing today. And it may be that you have multiple departments that are looking for automation, which is even better, because then that means that it makes it easier to get approval of that particular project internally. All right. So let’s see. Are we getting some results, Melissa? Let me come back to you and see if we’ve got any results coming in. What does the trend look like?
Melissa: We do and like, the trend is very much into accounts payable.
Peri: Oh, okay. Well, you know what? 95% people started AP, it’s probably even higher than that. So it’s also a very practice at simple to articulate. So you’re not alone. That’s where most people start. All right, so let’s kind of wrap things up for today. And then we can open it up for a little bit of Q&A. But I thought that what we might wanna do is take a look at just you know why? Why is DocLink, such an important solution to bring to your organization. And I think probably what we could say is the number one is that it truly is an enterprise wide solution, and can manage the entire cradle to grave lifecycle of a document, and have documents at your fingertips. And then we start diving into all the other really beautiful elements. Do you wanna leverage OCR and what we showed you in terms of that automated matching, which can really drive data entry savings and time savings. And that’s gonna compel your organization forward. That’s a great part. Do you need to use a workflow tool set right to be able to put documents through a business process? That’s a very powerful feature of the application. And then we didn’t talk too too much about it, although we did kind of hinted it. But you can do all sorts of automation using rules that are important to your organization right? We talked a lot about powerful search retrieval, and what it means to organizations to have documents at your fingertips. Regardless, if you’re talking about AP, or of course through out the other areas as well. Now, we didn’t touch too too much on smart forms today. But that’s a great use case, when you wanna start extending DocLink to kind of some other sub-categories, like expense reports, or what’s been very popular right, recently is ingesting the CSV file from the credit card bank, and then putting that to a business process. So the end users can attach their receipts to the line levels, and then have that transacted as well. So that might be a real key area, especially for those on the AP side of things.
Looks like in today’s conversation, we didn’t have too many takers on automated document delivery. So I’m gonna keep on going on that one. But we did talk about that DocuSign electronic signature and being able to kind of keep those contracts in the system, and be able to leverage DocLlink and DocuSign to get those signed. And I always kind of like circling back that it’s an enterprise wide content management system. So the big question is really about where do you wanna go paperless? And it sounds like AP is really where you wanna start today. So I think with that, I would like to go into our last poll, Melissa? So I’m gonna kind of ask you again to initiate that poll. And this always gives me a little bit of a chuckle. So why are you attending today’s webinar? is it all about knowledge building, because you’re trying to gain ideas about how to compel or propel your organization forward? Did your boss make you? I think that that’s really kind of funny. I really like, C and D there’s an initiative in my department, and D, we could really use this, we’re ready to learn more, so contact me.
All right. So I’m gonna let that one kind of come about. And we’ll come back to you in a moment. And then I think what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna open it up for some Q&A. But here is our offer. If anything that we’ve been talking about today resonated with you, please reach out to your own core account manager, and they can get you in touch, of what we’d like to do is set up what’s called a Discovery Call, it’s simply where we all sit down together. And we talk about kind of what you’re doing today. What are your business goals, and then kind of outline what you’re doing in the various business processes. And if we go through that really simple exercise, then it makes it so simple, then to give you a preliminary quote, in terms of what we think the overall investment would be, and also gear up for a product demonstration that would be more specific to kind of what we had just talked about. And that way, we’re really honing in on those pieces of the application that are important to you, and helping your organization meet your goals okay.
All right. So Q&A. So Mark, are you ready for all those technical questions? Now leverage on… leverage you heavily for those ones? All right. So let’s see. What are other questions? Do we have any thoughts about what you’ve seen, or any need for additional information? And Melissa, I’ll maybe call on you to help manage the chat as well, if you wouldn’t mind?
Melissa: Absolutely, yes. And nobody answered that their boss made them. So I just wanted to…it’s all about knowledge.
Peri: Oh, good.
Melissa: So it’s good to know. Yes, I’ve got a few questions here. So first one, does this have a vendor portal where vendors can view payment information?
Mark: So yeah, I mean, can take that definitely. And to kind of go beyond that, you know, simple yes, answer. Absolutely. But any document that you want your customers or vendors to be able to see will be available in the DocLink web portal. So yeah, it can definitely be done.
Melissa: Okay, great. Next one. How are documents saved? Do they get saved on a server or on the Cloud?
Mark: So either would be the short answer, it’s, the DocLink can come in two flavors that’s gonna be on Premise. So if your existing ERP is on Premise today, DocLink can be on Premise as well. And it could be in the Cloud as well. So if you’re, on D365 in the Cloud, DocLink can communicate Cloud to Cloud or even in a hybrid model where DocLinks in the Cloud, then ERP is on Premise and the documents are gonna reside either on Premise or in the Cloud.
Melissa: Okay, great. Last question. How long is the average setup time with companies i.e. configuration, etc.?
Mark: It could depend on the project itself. That’s the short answer. We can get into that just depending on the modules and the services needed for those if there’s customization, things like that, but a couple months is what we typically see 60, 90 days is a pretty typical implementation process.
Melissa: Okay, great. That’s it for questions. I don’t know if you guys have anything more you wanted to add?
Peri: No, not from our perspective. Thank you very, very much for spending time with us today. Sure hope it was a very informative session and we got a little bit about the peek into what’s happening in organizations and why it would be important to go paperless today.
Melissa: Great, thanks so much to both of you. And have a good afternoon, everyone.
Mark: Thank you.
Melissa: Thanks.
Peri: Thanks. Goodbye everyone.
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