IQ LINK will save you money. Here’s how.

IQ LINK strikes the happy medium between your hard-copy and automated information workflows, so you’ll get the benefits without the downsides—imagine that!

Although many companies have decades of experience dealing with manual, paper-based processes research has shown that business process management automation can drastically reduce operational expenses related to paper processing while simultaneously drastically reducing response times. Automating business processes is important not only for the benefit of customer retention, reduced costs and wider profit margins but also as a way to assert control over chaotic manual processes and lessen the risk of compliance violations and litigation.

IQ LINK will help defeat the challenges commonly faced by all companies dealing with a large number of documents or other digitised information and will assist in reducing litigation risk by addressing slow response times, data inaccessibility, and operational bottlenecks. IQ LINK is an information platform capable of meeting corporate governance and compliance needs regardless of geographical boundaries.

Terms such as governance and compliance are used often enough that people can get their meanings confused. The commonly accepted meaning of corporate governance is the lowering of operational costs, increasing of worker productivity and improvement of financial performance. Corporate compliance refers to a company obeying established laws and regulations in the country or state where it conducts business.

While traditionally manual and paper-based document processes were standard, we are now finding their purpose being replaced with electronic/digital documents and automated business processes. These changes can be seen in all aspects from government departments to councils; from retrieving electronic procedures to downloading the latest timesheet or timetables and more.

In many cases, the shift toward digital records management is mandated as a part of corporate governance improvement efforts. Digitisation of business information can increase customer responsiveness, reduce operational costs, increase productivity and help achieve standards compliance.

When tied to a hard-copy document workflow, businesses restrict their ability to collaborate.

When tied to a hard-copy document workflow, businesses restrict their ability to collaborate and can drastically reduce employee safety in situations where obsolete information is the only kind at hand. Conversely, a wholly digital information workflow is impractical, particularly in operating environments where access to a computer (and computer literacy) cannot be guaranteed. In practice, this contradiction causes a bastardisation of both systems, dividing the business into those who value document control and those who do not.

IQ LINK takes a different tack, preferring to allow the user to dictate the method of document retrieval that makes most sense to him or herself. Users who prefer to access and interact with information on-screen only are (of course) accommodated, without alienating those with a business or operational necessity to work from hard-copy. By incorporating barcodes into the hard-copy documents, IQ LINK makes it trivial to ensure any hard-copy document is still valid and up-to-date.

Regardless of the size of a company, any company that processes a large amount of documents faces common business challenges. Some of the more frequently encountered challenges are:

• Compliance and litigation risk
• Slow response time and customer dissatisfaction
• Data inaccessibility and storage costs
• Manual processes and operational bottlenecks

These challenges can each negatively affect a business if left unaddressed. Combined, these issues represent a significant detraction from the company’s bottom line. Leveraging IQ LINK to make your soft-copy documents easily available to your entire workforce will minimise unnecessary manual paper processes without so restricting them that their existing advantages cannot be maintained.

Compliance and litigation risk

Compliance and litigation risk-minimisation is of the utmost importance for companies needing to comply with regulations, particularly those relating to Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S). However, the ability to maintain full adherence to regulations is clearly at risk for companies with a heavy reliance on paper-dependent and manual processes.

With each manual or procedural error, the potential to violate regulations increases as does the possibility of litigation, government fines and government remedial action. Taking a “business-as-usual” approach is not only contrary to good business practices but can be construed as a failure of corporate responsibility to maintain a safe and efficient workplace.

Slow response time and customer dissatisfaction

Research performed on behalf of Kodak has found that paper-based processes can cost up to 22 times more than computer-assisted, electronic document processing^[1].

Furthermore the same research found that eliminating manual processes can reduce the time required to find the latest approved version of a document by more than 95% (from 4 hours to 10 minutes).

Unfortunately, paper-based manual processes are still commonplace in business. With a high volume and variety of documents being used by your workforce, it is often further complicated by the fact that many different people need access to the same information.

For companies that rely on manual paper processes, it can take days or even weeks to respond to customer enquiries and requests. Customers can be forgiven for perceiving the company is unresponsive or negligent when in fact the blame lies on the needlessly convoluted process required to access the right information. The fact is that relying on manual processes frequently results in procedural bottlenecks that negatively impact the customer experience, customer loyalty, and repeat business.

These bottlenecks not only adversely impact the customer experience, but also directly contribute to lower productivity and higher operational expense.

Data inaccessibility and storage cost

Another challenge of paper-based processes associated with critical business areas is the inability to promptly access documents that are stored off-site or in separate storage rooms within the organisation. Even in organisations that no longer store physical copies of documents it is not unusual for imaging and storage processes to divide information across multiple repositories (often by kind or business unit) making information retrieval difficult and time-consuming.

If information is migrated offline to optical or tape storage, documents can be unavailable for days at a time, creating a problem as bad as paper-based document storage. Further, when information resides in multiple databases or content repositories across varying storage infrastructure, or in numerous on- and off-site storage facilities, the organisation will inevitably encounter operational problems including:

• Slow response times
• Cost overruns
• Productivity loss
• Inability to comply with regulations

IQ LINK is also unique in that it’s also made available to users via a custom-built, touch-screen network kiosk. Whereas many systems mandate that only users with access to a network-enabled PC workstation can search or browse for the latest revision of a document, IQ LINK sets itself apart by actively engaging those users who, in many cases, most urgently require access to the latest approved safe work procedures or other similar types of information; those without access to a conventional PC.

Manual processes and operational bottlenecks

One of the facts of doing business in a paper-based system is that manual processes inevitably create operational bottlenecks that negatively impact company profits. The bottlenecks themselves are caused by a variety of reasons including:

• Inability of management to accurately balance workloads
• Lost paperwork
• Misdirected paperwork
• Inaccurate paperwork that forces a process to start over
• Employee illness or resignation

Regardless of whether the company has one large bottleneck or several small ones, processing time for retrieving the latest approved document can increase from minutes to hours or from days to weeks. The result is increased costs and an inability to respond quickly in the market, beat competitors, reduce safety risk for the workforce or meet customer expectations.

The business need for a document and information processing solution

Every business has some system for cataloguing and retrieving their documents (whether or not they’re digitised) but no matter how you store them the primary focus of any document system must be making those documents available to the people who need them.

IQ LINK can connect to practically any existing computerised information storage solution (containing documents or otherwise) and bring the latest approved documents to a single, unified location.

IQ LINK acts as a single portal to all your systems, presented the data tracked therein in a consistent, simplified way to cut through the feature bloat and get straight down to the information that your regular users require. Users with a need to use the more esoteric features of your other systems simply continue to use the more complex interface made available by the system’s original manufacturer and everything is kept seamlessly up-to-date.

Catalyst for change

It is no secret that iQmultimedia developed iPICK on behalf of BHP Billiton and to the specific needs of our client, something we’re incredibly proud of.

iPICK was a first-generation information portal that made finding the lasted approved documents as an end-user remarkably simple, but was designed to work within a specific environment and with some particularly unusual infrastructure requirements. Two years after it was first deployed, iPICK is now successfully deployed at mine sites across Australia and the US and has delivered huge benefits to that client.

With IQ LINK, we took our experience and feedback we’d received from users and administrators alike, and improved the entire system from the ground up—a truly next-generation information system.

Substantial investment was made into taking a different approach; to deliver a much more extensible, fundamentally more robust and functionally richer product suite. We challenged ourselves to simplify and streamline the experience of all who would interact with the software (from end-users to system administrators) whilst making a tool that inherently adapted to a broad customer base and the myriad of systems used by business and government.

IQ LINK has been designed from the ground up to be improved and extended in all directions. What that means, fundamentally, is that you can develop new modules (connecting your users to new types of information) faster and cheaper, and with far greater control than ever before. You can read more about how IQ LINK makes connecting to your other systems here.

Conclusion

For companies that rely on manual, paper processes, efforts must be made to leverage on technology that will enable the company to not only effectively compete in the market, but also to ensure regulatory compliance while decreasing operational costs.

It is clear that the single best way to achieve cost reduction and regulatory compliance is to minimise the reliance the organisation has on as many manual processes as possible.

A modern document and information system is the first step to lowering costs and eliminating problems commonly associated with manual processes. The second step is to implement a centralised online storage infrastructure that can provide instant access to archived data subject to regulatory scrutiny. We enable companies to step away from reliance on paper documents or electronic documents stored offline through IQ LINK and its modules.

This technology provides a complete set of capabilities for streamlining and automating processes as well as providing a highly compliant and cost-effective infrastructure. Far from being limited to mining, industries such as transportation, defence, healthcare, legal and petrochemical that are faced with large volumes of paper documents can benefit from this technology.

In light of the continuing pressure to focus on compliance, corporate governance initiatives related to cost reduction and productivity enhancement are occasionally sacrificed. With IQ LINK technology however, compliance and corporate governance enhancements are possible to achieve in tandem, making IQ LINK important to consider for cost-conscious businesses.

1. The State of Document Imaging Solutions Survey, CMP Research, June 2007 (Retrieved Oct 15 2009). ↑