Maximizing Efficiency While Addressing Regulatory Compliance:

Integrating Forms into your Records Management Strategy

By Sylvia Feldman, Corporate Writer, Optical Image Technology, Inc.

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Imagine this scenario: For more than a decade, your organization has thrived as a direct result of its ability to operate frugally. You have prided yourself on your company’s reputation and its ability to continually remain profitable—even during difficult times. You are lauded for your contributions to the community, and respected by your peers for your principled standards.

Then you have a “litigation incident.”

Legal proceedings in the business world are all too common in this age of compliance and e-discovery. Your company could be operating under the highest of ethical standards, but if it is not equipped to quickly access and produce information, it could be subject to severe penalties from which it might never recover. Fortunately, if you have the ability to index, manage, and deliver the records that are integral to your business processes, you can anticipate and address legal proceedings. If you have the foresight to consider the entire document lifecycle when managing your records, then, with a little planning and preparation, the aforementioned scenario could easily result in a favorable outcome.

Ideally, you have already integrated (or are in the process of integrating) records management as an integral part of your business. The interrelationships between business processes, policies, and technology should be considered. How can you use technology to support your business processes? Can records be retrieved efficiently? What architecture is in place throughout your enterprise to ensure that records that have to be retained will be retained?

Records must retain their authenticity through time, and must remain as reliable as they were when they were first created. Technology obsolescence can also be a challenge, as new IT developments are occurring daily. Time frames and disposition (archival or destruction) schedules should also be considered, as should types and volumes of records.

Your approach to forms is important, as they are at the heart of your records management strategy. Forms are the lifeblood of most organizational processes. Whether they originate internally or externally, they usually contain information without which businesses could not survive. They serve as vital communications with customers and prospects, and enable businesses to add and update information with ease. As such, they are an essential component to your operations. Integrating forms into a holistic records management strategy enables organizations to realize better efficiency, and at the same time, improve both their compliance measures and their customer service.

Efficiency: Meeting and exceeding your business objectives

By now, you are probably aware of the benefits in efficiency that your organization can gain by transitioning from paper processes to electronic. For most organizations, however, the aspiration of a completely paperless office is tempered with the reality that some exchanges still have to take place using paper. As you evaluate your own communications that are still paper-based, consider whether they eventually will need to be incorporated into your corporate records scheme. Paper forms, as part of their lifecycle, frequently are round-trip travelers. Bar coding your outgoing paper communications will ensure that incoming paper communications will be properly indexed and preserved. Bar codes also facilitate more efficient delivery of incoming mail, enabling faster processing with automated workflow.

Processing of incoming forms can be further expedited with optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent character recognition (ICR). These technologies enable scanners to recognize handwritten text, and enable organizations to simultaneously extract data, reduce keying errors. More importantly, they enable you to take advantage of workflow technology so that forms which should be retained as records can be identified and automatically incorporated into your system. By addressing business objectives and incorporating forms into their overall records management strategy, organizations are able to increase workloads without adding additional staff.

Regulatory compliance: Taking the bite out of e-discovery

Let’s face it. When we are discussing forms as they relate to records management, what we are really talking about is our ability to locate and retrieve our information. Without a holistic, enterprise vision for your information, this process can be arduous if not impossible. Paper forms are easily duplicated, lost, or misplaced, making the retrieval process inordinately time-consuming. Electronic document management (EDM) is imperative to the storage and retrieval process, but alone, it is not enough. You also need to consider some type of hierarchical storage management (HSM) so that you can automate records disposition.

HSM provides rules and structure so that specific information is retained, and allows you to automate those rules so that the potential for human error is taken out of the equation. HSM allows you to manage records that the law requires you keep for a particular time period, and allows you to automatically purge records from your system when they expire. It offers the ability to perform automatic back ups, on or off site, of all of the documents within your system. With the inverse relationship between storage costs and records volumes, it is helpful to have the ability to migrate older records to less expensive storage media. With a solid architecture in place, older records can still be retrieved efficiently (albeit somewhat less quickly).

The net result: Improved customer service

A forms strategy that addresses your business needs while complying with industry regulations has another added benefit: It almost always results in streamlined processes that improve your abilities to serve customers. Consider the benefits of XML-based software that would allow your organization to create online forms. Customers and employees could submit their information over the Internet, eliminating the delays (and potential for error) that are associated with postal submission.

A robust EDM system has the capacity to allow you to configure your forms so that, upon receipt, they can be launched into an automated workflow. Regardless of whether your organization receives online materials associated with claims, applications, loan processing, billing, HR documentation, underwriting, or other forms, built-in rules can determine whether they should be treated as records. XML-based forms can be used for intra-office communications as well, ensuring that your internal documentation is safe, secure, and retrievable (with the proper authorization) in case of an audit. These days, customers expect more timely service and a much more rapid response than in the past. Configuring your forms to make them available online addresses customers’ needs and at the same time assures that your organization is operating in accordance with regulatory requirements. Materials can be routed throughout the organization to ensure that they are processed consistently by the right person at the right time.

The threat of litigation can provide an impetus to evaluate and improve your organization’s processes. When you consider the added efficiencies that such an evaluation can offer, you will doubtlessly realize that your EDM system has the potential to provide tremendous benefits beyond mere storage and retrieval. Talk with your EDM vendor’s professional services team today to explore your options for incorporating your forms into your records management strategy. Your future might depend on it.

To find out more about how incorporating forms into your records management strategy, or to learn more about Optical Image Technology’s DocFinity software products and services, please contact us (http://www.docfinity.com) at 814.238.0038 or email info@docfinity.com.

 

©2007 Optical Image Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. DocFinity, IntraVIEWER, and XML FormFLOW are trademarks or registered trademarks of Optical Image Technology, Inc.