A lifecycle are the rules the define how the different documents travel throughout their life. If you consider a document’s life in its simplest form...

A document is created that contains information. It is involved in a process to deliver, or further gather, information from business applications or a community of users. This information expires, or is no longer needed, and then the document is deleted, archived or updated to repeat the process.

The lifecycle is designed to match a document’s life, managing the data gathering and distribution process between business applications and the user community. The lifecycle configurations are called a Lifecycle Application.

Document Lifecycles

The Life of a Typical Invoice

1.An invoice is created by a vendor automatically from their accounts payable system

2.It is then sent to the customer for payment either by sending it through the regular mail, email, or some other method

3.Once the invoice is received, the data on the invoice is typed into the accounts payable system for processing by the finance department

4.The invoice may be checked at this point to confirm that it is valid

5.The finance department codes it and then sends the invoice to the appropriate individuals for approval

6.Once all the approvals are gathered the invoice returns to the finance group for payment

7.The invoice is then archived until its records retention period has expired, at which time it may be deleted

The Life of a Typical Loan File

1.A portfolio of loan documents are uploaded to a secure FTP

2.The documents need to be analyzed and sorted into a structure format so they can be imported in a document management system

3.An import process takes the documents from the location provided, retrieving document index data from a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet

4.Loan service representatives review the imported data and confirm that everything has been imported and associated correctly

5.The documents are then distributed to the document management system for access

6.The documents remain there until a period of time after the loan has matured and may be deleted as part of a records retention policy

Looking at the Scenarios

Looking at the two scenarios from a traditional viewpoint:

The invoice scenario is considered a document workflow, whereas the loan servicing scenario is considered document capture.

This is where DocuNECT is considered unique, as it accurately maps to all aspects of the document lifecycle. DocuNECT combines document workflow and capture.

In DocuNECT’s world, workflow is really part of the document indexing/extraction stage. Allowing users and business applications to perform actions on the documents to gather, confirm, and exchange information.

Types of Lifecycle Applications

As DocuNECT can be applied to several different scenarios we have classified the types of applications as follows:

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