Category: Cloud storage and business continuity

Creativity and innovation in information management

Creativity and innovation are vital to the successful performance of organisations across the globe. Fast-paced changes in technology, economic shifts, globalisation and everyday life has led to increased competition.

Today, 21st April 2022, marks World Creativity and Innovation Day. A day designated by the United Nations to raise awareness of the role of creativity and innovation in all aspects of human development.

At OASIS Group we wanted to take this opportunity to explore and celebrate creativity and innovation in information management. We’ve spoken with Team Members and peers to compile the below list.

Information Management systems

OK, so this may seem like an obvious one however some of us can still remember the days of paper management systems, before software designed to facilitate the storage, organisation and retrieval of information were introduced.

We say remember…however we do still meet organisations managing their information using manual paper based processes.

Collecting and managing data that is stored in a variety of formats, making it accessible to the people who need it is the innovation that we often take for granted. With more people working remotely than ever before, we have no doubt that there are more creative innovations on the horizon (we may also have insider knowledge on this topic)!

Smartphones

Initially this may not be an obvious choice for information management (even though it was a popular answer) however imagine having to carry around an address book of all your client’s contact details, rather than having them all stored in your phone. Or worse, having to memorise all those phone numbers and email addresses.

Needing to carry a laptop around to click approve on a payment when you can simply use a mobile banking app on your phone. These are all innovations that came from understanding how and why we use information and data.

Microfilm and Microfiche

Now some of you may be reading this saying Micro-what-now? Others may be fondly remembering what were once indispensable ways of preserving and backing up records in a compact way.

Whilst technology has advanced through innovation, creativity and necessity, some organisations are still using microfilm and microfiche today. For some the changing of the process seems daunting, for others there has been no push to conversion as microfiche was expected to last for 100 years. The problem is the devices for viewing both microfilm and microfiche are becoming harder to get hold of.

For those companies we would say don’t panic. At OASIS Group we have specialist Team Members trained to use various reading and conversion devices.

Business Process Automation (BPA)

Business process automation, also known as business automation or digital transformation, uses technology to automate complex business processes. For companies looking to achieve their digital transformation goals business process automation is a great place to start.

Unlike other automation processes business process automation connects to multiple IT systems and is tailored specifically to the needs of each organisation. Therefore rather than an out of the box solution, workflow is used to replicate, or build upon an existing business process.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Robotic process automation focuses on automating individual tasks (such as reading a document or fetching data from a database or system). Unlike BPA, which looks to achieve full process automation, robotic process automation focuses on smaller tasks within a larger process.

By using robots to do repetitive parts of a larger process; such as moving files, copying data, filling in forms or logging into systems, humans are freed up to be creative or further innovate to improve processes and procedures.

Future Innovations

Whilst this list includes just five innovations within information management there are many more we could have included. Knowledge and information are at the heart of innovation and we are seeing more creative responses to problem solving everyday.

By understanding how we interact with the data and information in our own organisations we can achieve new and exciting innovations.

Exploring The Benefits Of A Digital Mailroom

Now, more than ever before, organisations of all sizes are adopting new methods and procedures in order to streamline the way in which they work. For those that didn’t already know, one of the most prominent developments within the last decade is the digital mailroom. Also known as electronic mailroom, this system will revolutionise not only your in-house postal functions but also streamline the ways in which teams and departments collaborate. Below you will find insight in to just a few of the benefits of using a digital mailroom.

Reduces Environmental Damage

As one would imagine, adapting your business processes and practices so that you are now a predominantly digital organisation will do wonders for your carbon footprint. Having excessive incoming mail can lead to an increasingly large quantity of paper simply being disposed of in general waste, which is extremely harmful to the environment and an information security risk. Physical mail is often read once, and then discarded without a moment’s hesitation. By adopting a digital mailroom solution, you are able to format all of your electronic information with ease, and you can do this without needing to waste paper documents.

Increase Overall Efficiency

There is an age-old saying within the business world that remains relevant to this day – time is money. Should you continue to use the older method that revolves around paper, you will have to delegate a number of employees to spend countless hours sorting through the documents. This manual process is extremely time consuming and takes time away from skilled individuals that could be focusing on other core business tasks. If you are looking for a cost-effective solution for receiving high volumes of letters, look no further than a digital mailroom.

Improved Service for Clients

One of the most important factors that contribute towards a company’s success is the ability to consistently provide top-tier client care. This is imperative should you wish to remain competitive within your industry, after all, client satisfaction tends to be reduced when queries are left unanswered. A huge difference between paper and electronic mail is that when things are in digital format, it is not only easier to read, it is also significantly more convenient to respond to.

Better Regulatory Compliance

Regardless of the industry, organisations across Europe are required to adhere to a number of growing governmental regulations regarding client confidentiality and personally identifiable information (PII). Identity fraud has become an increasingly prevalent issue in recent years, so the storing of information must be closely monitored. By adopting the method of document scanning and digital ingestion utilising a digital mailroom, you are able to hide confidential information behind extra layers of security, subsequently reducing the chances of content being lost. In the long-term, this is an excellent way to reduce costs.

Departmental Collaboration

There is a reason departmental collaboration is the last point in our list, this is because it is the most overlooked benefit of utilising a digital mailroom. More often than not documentation received by a business or organisation needs to be reviewed by multiple departments or teams. Individuals may be on different floors, in different buildings or even different countries. Unlike traditional post, which needs to be reposted or scanned and emailed, digital mailrooms allow users to assign to individuals or other team queues for review. Not only does this save time and money, and remove the risk of a data breach, it also helps build interdepartmental relations.

About OASIS Group

Are you looking for a digital mailroom solution but unsure of where to start? We believe that we can provide an incredibly beneficial service. We have decades of experience providing records and information management services to organisations of varying size and industry. We also have over 1,700 Team Members committed to providing outstanding support to our clients.

If you would like to speak with one of our specialist team to find out more about the services we provide, including digital mailroom, please complete our online quotation form.

How your business can make workflow automation work for you

Over the last few years more and more businesses are being encouraged to utilise automated workflow solutions to streamline processes across their organisations. Whilst the theory behind workflow automation is clear to understand, ‘to make the flow of documents, information or tasks perform independently in accordance with defined business rules’, it can be unclear where to start.

“Workflow is for big business”

Something we hear quite a lot is that “workflow is for big business”, this absolutely is not true. Whether your business has 1 employee, 1 thousand employees or 1 million employees there will always be efficiencies gained by automating certain processes.

Think about your personal life, automation is increasing on a daily basis. You likely have an automated reminder to wake-up, maybe you have an automated coffee at a set time in the morning, ice on demand or a direct debit to pay a bill. These are all examples of automation.

Automation in our personal lives lets us focus on more family time, why not let business automation allow you to focus more time on clients, employees or revenue generating activities.

How will Workflow automation work for me?

Automating workflow offers a large number of benefits to businesses, below are just a few high-level examples of how you can make workflow automation work for your business:

Reduce administration errors

By eliminating the manual process of inputting data, workflow automation reduces administrative errors. This is especially important for business-critical processes and matching data against legal or regulatory requirements.

Increase productivity

Generally, the number one reason clients contact us about implementing workflow automation is to increase productivity. For instance, using automated workflow to match and verify a PO number against an invoice will automatically trigger the next task in the process.

Collaboration and team working

An often-overlooked benefit of workflow automation is the collaboration opportunities it provides to organisations of all sizes. One such example of this is the use of workflow automation to manage mailroom processes. Mail can be routed to individuals or teams to take action, based on business rules, and comments can be attributed to specific documents to aid processing by other departments as well as providing an audit trail of who has viewed or taken action.

Real-time reporting

Workflow automation, and business process automation (BPA) in general, provides business leaders with real-time access to the status of business tasks, including opportunities for process improvements. With more precise data and projections business leaders can understand current and future business needs and income.

Identifying the need for Workflow automation

In preparation for developing workflow automation for your business there are some important steps to take:

Identify the areas of the business where workflow automation can be used to perform business tasks.
Audit your business processes to ensure they are still fit for purpose.
Involve your employees that currently perform manual tasks.
Review your business goals and objectives against potential process automations.
Decide on a pilot project. You may have identified 3, 5, 10 or 50 potential areas suitable for workflow automation but like with any project choose one area to define the process.

How do I choose the solution that works for my business?

Not all software solutions offering automated workflow will offer the same benefits or features, so it is important to consider the complexities of your current business processes.

Are you using legacy systems? If yes, does data need to be migrated or integrated with the new solution?

Do you want the ability to create your own workflows? Or are you looking for a fully managed solution with ongoing IT set-up work?

There are many complexities to automation, so make sure to choose a partner that understands your objectives and can add value to your business.

Get in touch

Are you thinking of automating your business workflow? Get in touch via our online form. Our workflow automation will send your message directly to one of our specialist advisors who will be in touch to discuss your workflow automation needs.

Major new release of OASIS Group’s EDRMS ‘Omnidox’ gives users the power to automate back-office processes

OASIS Group, one of the largest Records and Information Management (RIM) providers in Europe, has announced the 5th generation launch of its multi award-winning Electronic Document and Records Management System (EDRMS) Omnidox.

“We are excited to be launching the 5th generation of Omnidox to the European market,” said Espen Halvorsen, Chief Executive Officer at OASIS Group. “We believe that this software will revolutionise every aspect of the client experience.”

The advance of technology has brought a revolutionary impact of not only the user experience available in Omnidox 5, but also the functionality available to the end-user. The real value from the newest generation Omnidox cloud platform comes from the ability for authorised users to quickly create business workflows to automate back-office processes.

Putting the power in the hands of the user significantly decreases the onboarding process, allowing departments, divisions and entire companies to switch from paper to digital based processes quicker than ever before. Bypassing the need for internal IT set-up or bespoke IT development significantly increases the potential ROI for OASIS Group’s clients.

“Bringing the consumer experience to enterprise users, whilst ensuring the deliverability of advanced tools for analysing business critical information was a key factor in our development process,” said Steve Townley, Group Information Management & Technology Director, OASIS Group

You Don’t Have To Be A Big Corporation To Start Your Digital Transformation

What is Digital Transformation?

When you read the phrase ‘Digital Transformation’ it likely means something different to you than it does to your suppliers, your clients and potentially your colleagues. This is because digital transformation will look different for every company, furthermore departments within the same organisation may view this differently.

There is no one right answer for what your digital transformation journey should look like. Even if two companies share the same eventual goals such as; going paperless or reaching digital business maturity, the touch-points within the journey will be established through your internal processes and policies.

Who should implement a Digital Transformation Strategy?

With digital technologies driving innovation Digital Transformation is impacting on businesses of all sizes, across all industries. In today’s technology driven world it is now, more than ever, possible for SME’s to share in the technological benefits once afforded to large corporations. In fact, at OASIS we have BlueChip and SME clients using the same technologies and gaining similar levels of efficiencies and return on investment.

Simply put, every organisation must implement a Digital Transformation strategy to sustain their business. Research suggests that organisations have changed their attitudes towards digital processing and are now putting this at the forefront of their business strategies.

81% of organisations believe that ‘Digital Transformation’ is ‘important’ OR ‘very important’ to their organisation
AIIM, 2018

Where should I start?

Before starting your digital transformation, it is important that you first identify your end goal. Does your organisation want to free up employees’ time by automating certain processes? Or is your goal to streamline existing processes to better serve your clients? Your desired outcome will define your digital strategy so it’s important that you set it early on.

Collaborate with other departments, whilst it is unlikely every department has the same goals it is possible that similar business functions have aligned strategic goals. An example of this could be your organisations Accounts Payable department and Accounts Receivable department. Both may require a system that integrates with a shared accounting system such as Sage.

Misconceptions about Digital Transformation

One of the biggest misconceptions we hear about Digital Transformations is that it is a substantial project that needs to be implemented all at once. This is not the case! In fact, we recommend that many of our clients take a phased approach. There are many reasons for this, and again it is dependent on the client’s needs, with the most likely reason being the sheer number of paper documentation an organisation has.

For instance, 2018 AIIM research indicates that many HR organisations are still mired in paper-based processes. When asked, “What is paper usage in the following processes?” The percentages answering, “A lot of documents are processed as paper documents” were;

Recruiting and selection = 35%
Employee onboarding = 48%
Employee file management = 53%
Policies and procedures administration = 32%
Employee separation = 48%

Whilst a percentage of organisations have the budget and staff available to undertake a large-scale project, more often than not projects such as Digital Transformations are put on hold because these required resources are not available. It is in this instance that we work with clients to put together an implementation plan that takes in to consideration their; resources, budget, timescales and volume of archive.

This is not to say that volume of paper documentation is the only concern, when migrating from an existing EDRMS or ECM platform organisations often need internal IT time to export digitised documentation. This can also cause delays depending on their availability.

Which technology is best for my organisation?

The first and foremost thing to ensure with any technology decision is that it is user-friendly, we always suggest that an end-user is involved in the decision-making process where possible. Engaging end-users in this process not only ensures that you have a system that best meets your needs but also allows a smooth transition process.

There is an ever-increasing number of emerging technologies that present tremendous opportunities for your organisation. Technology such as; Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Capture, eDiscovery, Repetitive Process Automation and Automated Data Recognition has become part of our daily lives. These new technologies are allowing organisations to do more than capture data, instead organisations are leveraging the capabilities of machines to understand and analyse the data they receive.

With a greater insight in to what information your organisation holds you are able to better comply with industry and governmental regulations such as GDPR and ETW.

The OASIS Solution

We offer a number of services that can help you, no matter where you are in your digital transformation process. Whether you are looking for Cloud services, digital imaging, workflow, automatic document recognition, Artificial Intelligence & machine learning or more we have a solution to help you.

Get in touch through our online form or email info@oasisgroup.com

Can AI put the human back in ‘HR’?

When AI was first introduced there were talks of the bots taking away jobs however they have shown, especially in the case of HR professionals, that rather than take away they are providing the ability to focus on the more important tasks associated with this profession.

As advances in technology continue to make AI more accessible throughout all aspects of our lives it is making the modern-day workplace virtually unrecognizable. With electronic personal assistants in our phones available 24/7 to answer those burning questions we are now at a point where we can actively manage our workload by prioritising what needs ‘human interaction’ and what can be put in the ‘hands’ of AI.

Freeing HR professionals to focus on the ‘human’ touch-points such as;

Managing complex employee relations
Developing HR policy and procedures
Managing talent and succession planning
Supporting the recruitment process

Approximately 50% of an HR department’s labour time is spent dealing with administration, which involves finding, sorting and processing paper and digital records. Both record types come with their own challenges, whilst digital records are perceived as more readily accessible how true is this? Records are held across multiple platforms such as; email, shared drives, payroll systems and more. With so many locations to search how sure can we be of the efficiencies that digital has afforded?

Classification and Automated Processing

One way to be sure of the efficiencies is to ensure that your digital processing includes AI! The OASIS automated processing system learns about your documents and classifies them according to your organisations standards. This enables rules to be applied against specific categories of documents, allowing for not only a far more efficient search process but enabling a dynamic digital archive.

System generated reports from OASIS’ cloud based Electronic Document Management System (EDRMS) Omnidox allows you to act if specific documents are missing, such as ETW or if documents are due to expire. Giving you greater control of your archive and ensuring you comply with governmental and industry regulations.

AI aids in GDPR discovery

Omnidox offers further AI opportunities in the form of a GDPR discovery module. In the event of a subject access request (SAR) the discovery module allows authorised users to search for documents in Omnidox by the requestors name, select all matching documents and download into a single PDF file with the name bookmarked and highlighted. Furthermore, there is an option to redact all PII data.

Get in touch

To speak with one of our AI specialists complete our online form or email info@oasisgroup.com