Business processes in larger organizations are closely associated with document flows. It is these document flows that create records of what happened when and where. Without such records, it is practically impossible to keep track of the numerous processes being carried out all across a sizable organization.
What Are Document Flows?
Documents record transactions, discussions, offers, decisions, agreements and practically everything else involved in carrying on a business. All these involve the participation of more than one person, and usually a group of persons. It means that documents have to move from person to person to serve the intended purposes.
It is this movement of documents in the course of various business processes that we call document flows.
How Do Document Flows Affect Business Results?
Document flows support business processes, as we saw above. It can help or hinder business processes depending on how they flow. This can best be illustrated by comparing paper based document flows with modern computer based flows.
In a paper based system, the document has to be physically transported from person to person. It is possible that the persons concerned might not be present at their workstations when documents needing their attention arrive. The documents can remain unattended because the recipients remain unaware of their arrival, or forget about them amidst other work.
In a computer based system, there is no physical movement of digital documents. They remain where they are, in the central server of the network accessible from all connected workstations. Persons working from their workstations can be alerted to all pending documents that need attention. Additionally, alerts can be generated if a document remains unattended for a certain time.
The above kind of automated document flow support can ensure that all documents are attended to. There are additional benefits such as easily retrievable look up lists to show workers what to do with each document and where to forward it once they have finished with it. Such lists can improve the quality of document flows.
Improved speed and quality of document flows result in improved business processes. To achieve this result, however, the document flows must be aligned to business processes. Unless carefully designed to do so, even computer based document flows can hinder efficient performance of business processes.
Designing Document Flows
A document management system should start with a detailed look at the business processes when building document flow facilities. Typically such facilities include the ability to forward documents to selected recipients, generation of alerts to call attention to pending documents and provision of look up lists and such aids to help persons decide what to do with a document and where to send it.
Centralized storage of documents in a manner accessible from all connected workstations is another feature of modern document workflows. This feature can be enhanced to make access possible from all over the world, which is something that is invaluable for global corporations.
Such global corporations will also typically have facilities to capture all documents generated all over its worldwide offices into the central storage.