- March 13, 2014
- FOXITBLOG
Today, process optimization is a critical issue as businesses consider the move to digital and mobile computing, the need to do more with reduced staff and resources, and the requirement to lower costs while improving productivity. Making business processes more efficient and streamlining the work environment are at the heart of resolving of these challenges.
There are a lot of aspects to improving workflows and processes, but it all starts with turning paper documents into digital information. Why? Because, familiar as it is, paper documentation is inherently inefficient. Paper documents get lost. They’re only searchable by a pair of eyes (or software that wants to digitize them anyway). They take up space. Go out of date. Can’t be easily collaborated on simultaneously unless your entire team huddles together around one cramped table. The list goes on.
Which is why your workflow optimization should begin with a document capture solution.
The best document capture solutions allows user to work with the data once it’s captured, maintaining its new electronic format to breathe new life into that data as it’s manipulated, revised, combined and reused. Which means that those document capture systems should have an OCR engine embedded within them to automatically turn paper into searchable data in accessible formats such as PDF documents created by PDF software.
Users must also be able to scan documents right into commonly used office software formats such as Microsoft Word, Excel or editable PDF format, like that produced by PDF software such as Foxit PDF Editor. This makes the data available to anyone in the company, as they need it. Best of all, it gives employees the information they need in formats familiar to them, which enables them to integrate it right into their own workflows.
To make business processes more efficient, you must have the capability of connecting your document capture system to your organization’s office information systems, which further enables digital information to be processed, shared, analyzed and used throughout your organization by anyone who needs it.
With a unified document capture solution, not only can you digitize paper-based information, but you’ve got a leg up on integrating content into the applications and systems that your business relies upon – a key step in making business processes more efficient.
What’s more, once that information is digitized, today’s PDF Editors enable you to maintain your newfound digital workflow. While they once made it hard to edit a document, today’s PDF software such as Foxit PDF Editor offers you features such as reflow, formatting, and paragraph editing, also known as word processing, just to name a few.
Keeping the workflow digital enables your company to realize greater efficiencies by eliminating version control nightmares, eliminating slowdowns caused by not having the application necessary to open the file, and more.
Today, once you implement a digital workflow and have your critical documents in PDF, you can simply leave them in PDF to realize more efficiencies. There’s simply no need to go backwards to word processing software. Which is why digitizing documents is indeed the first step forward in business efficiency.