Automation of document processing - is it a leap in development or just a useful habit?

Automating document flow can really take a lot of time and effort, but there is a significant risk that if the company has chaos on paper, then after automation there will be chaos on paper and chaos in electronic form. Which will lead to a doubling of the work duties of employees, an increase in workload, which is the opposite of increasing efficiency.

Automation of document processing is not a leap that can solve all the organization's problems in a few weeks, it is a gradual work, a daily work to improve the own efficiency of each employee.

If an employee or management has a situation where they don't want to do something, but they have to, it means that the internal goal of such a person does not correspond to the external goal. What does it mean?

This means that an employee's intrinsic goal may be to stay in that workplace and fear being made redundant as a result of automation.

The management's fear may be that they will have to take more responsibility, because as a result of automation, those processes that the management would sometimes like to cover up will become obvious.

The first and important step of the initiator of the introduction of the automation of document flow is to prove to the participants of the process that the automation will also be for their benefit.

For example: regarding the most common situations described above:

1. employees need to be assured that they will not be fired, but that another job will definitely be found for them (and it will definitely be found, as the enterprise that has embarked on the path of automation is developing);
2. Top management: the management needs to realize that covering up processes, even undesirable for them, delays the development of the enterprise and cannot last forever, therefore, even if some fundamental mistakes were made, responsibility for them will be carried out by normalizing processes, and not by public punishments.

After internal resistance and fears are removed, the desire to increase one's own efficiency will arise by itself in each participant of the process.

It is much more difficult to make rapid changes, the result will be much smaller from them than from translational processes. In this aspect, we have to turn to behavioral psychology, which has been investigating these processes for many years.

It is necessary to look at the functional duties of team members as daily habits.

Checking mail, answering questions by e-mail or in messengers, planning the day of appointments in Google Calendar, that is, the habits of most team members. If you improve your own efficiency by just 1% every day, then the growth for a year will be 365% in total, if you make an improvement of 20% in two weeks, then of course this will affect the volume or quality of the performance of other functional duties, which will be performed less time is allocated and the improvement efficiency will be 20%.

Please compare the following two examples for yourself.

You are an operations manager who prepares documents or a small business owner, a director who prepares documents yourself or a lawyer who prepares documents. Your company has a task to automate document flow, in particular, using a document designer.

Scenario 1

• You have a contract that is relatively simple, you just need to change the counterparty in it. First, you received a request to verify the counterparty, you were sent a statement, articles of association and other details of the counterparty. You checked it in the registers and signed off that it is possible to cooperate with such a counterparty.
• Two days later, a request to prepare a contract with him came. As a rule, the preparation is quite urgent, so you take the latest Word version of the required contract and simply enter the data in the header and in the details, reprinting them from the statutory documents or copy-paste, if the counterparty also sent these data in text.
• A month later, you receive a request to make an additional agreement or a letter or a claim to this counterparty, it turns out that the previous Word versions of the documents were saved somewhere on Google Drive, a remote server or on the phone, or the document was prepared by another employee, then you take the latest Word version of the document again which is most similar to the one required for your situation and rewrite all the data from statutory documents or copy paste. At the same time, it is necessary to look again in the register to see if there have been any changes in the counterparty's data.
• And since each contract can have an unlimited number of additional agreements, acts, invoices and other documents, this procedure can be repeated endlessly.

But if the company aims to enter new markets, then the first thing you need to do is work with the efficiency of your own team so that it can complete more tasks in a shorter period of time.

Scenario 2

• You have received a request to check the counterparty, you have been sent an extract, statute and other details of the counterparty. You checked it in the registers and signed off that it is possible to cooperate with such a counterparty.
• You immediately entered all data on the counterparty in the register of counterparties on the InstaDoc platform .
• Two days later, a request to prepare a contract with him came. You copy all the counterparty's data from the register and generate the required document on the InstaDoc website. The stage of copying and pasting data into the document header and details is leveled.
• A month later, a request is received to make an additional agreement or a letter or a claim to this counterparty, it turns out that the Draft of the last generated document is stored in the cloud. You press the "update from the register" button against the counterparty and see whether there have been any changes in the counterparty's data. Make a final check of the counterparty, strengthened if necessary, and generate a draft of the required document.

That is, several steps of copy-paste are eliminated and the possibility of enhanced verification of the counterparty and structuring of the agreement appears.

If you as a document manager, lawyer, or small business owner had a habit of:

1. enter the counterparty's data into the register in any system, upload statutory documents to the counterparty's profile immediately after processing the request for verification of the counterparty, and
2. enter the latest documents into the template (document designer),

Then immediately when preparing the second document, you would notice the following changes:

1) you have created a register of counterparties with the most complete data, as well as supporting documents, from which you can take data much more quickly than from the latest current Word document and compare them with the founding documents;

2) you would have created templates of documents that you use most often. You will be able to quickly provide them with options that were missing in the previous document (for example, there was a contract that only provided for prepayment, and then you would add a clause that provides for partial prepayment.

3) creating any new document will take much less time than searching for the most recent and closest to the required Word file and rewriting the counterparty's data from statutory documents or copy paste and checking data with statutory documents and registers.

If you estimate the time spent on developing a new habit of entering a counterparty into the register of counterparties, it will take 3-5 minutes to make an entry in the register (for example, in relation to legal entities and sole proprietorships, the main data of the counterparty are generally pulled from the register, except for the position of the manager and bank accounts) . Now remember how long you spend looking for the document you need in the Word version, if it was stored in the messenger, in one of several emails, on a remote drive or somewhere in the download?

Automation expert, lawyer

Inna Yanovska

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