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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 DocuNECT lifecycle is designed to match a document’s lifecycle, managing the data gathering and distribution process between business applications and the user community.
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Let’s consider 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 loan documents as part of portfolio for servicing may be simpler
1.Thousands of loans are downloaded from a secure FTP site
2.The documents need to be analyzed and sorted into a structured 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 after the loan has matured and may be deleted as part of a records retention policy
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.
Lifecycle Stages
A document lifecycle has the following stages.
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CAPTURE
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Today organizations face the challenge of receiving electronic documents from different sources that need to be captured, classified and processed.
Keeping pace with ever changing file formats, data types, and business processes can result in a collection of micro solutions which often prove difficult to support. This process of managing information delivered via secure FTP, email, websites, business applications and other sources into your document management system can be time and labor intensive.
•Capture/Scan documents directly from your desktop
•Upload documents directly from Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote
•Drag and drop emails and attachments
•Easily integrate multi-function devices
•Automatically capture documents from multiple electronic sources, including DocuSign and MeridianLink
•Migrate documents from legacy document management system
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DISCOVER
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Documents need to be combined with business data to be classified, so they can be searched, archived and processed. The classification process analyzes documents based on business rules to extract content from documents, and optionally allow users to review and amend the data.
•Defines business rules and templates to recognize documents and extract data
•Review classification results in a web-based interface
•Route documents to different user roles for review
•Escalate documents to other users for classification and indexing assistance
•Utilize machine learning to reduce user interaction
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DISTRIBUTE
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Document management is a mature marketplace and most organizations have some form of document management in place. Our distribution module can be used to integrate with your document management system to leverage your existing investment. In addition, data extracted from documents can be distributed to third party business applications such as SAP and Microsoft Dynamics GP.
•Use DocuNECT’s powerful workflow to route documents to different users to gather and confirm data.
•Distribute documents and data to third party document management systems
•Distribute extracted business data to business applications
•Documents and data can also be distributed to traditional sources, such as FTP, secure FTP and File Shares
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MANAGE
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In today's world of increasing compliance, file cabinets, local user PC's and network drives are not effective ways to manage documents. As part of a complete lifecycle solution, document management promotes collaboration, efficiency and compliance.
•Powerful search by business data and document content
•Version control for collaboration
•Audit trail that stores all changes to a document
•Create dashboards to provide an intuitive interface for different user roles
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RETAIN
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Regulations and internal policies govern how long documents can be kept for as well as what happens to them when the retention period expires. Automating records retention can make sure that organizations stay within these regulations and policies.
•Add retention rules to different types of documents
•Notifications are sent when the policies are about to expire
•Rules based document disposition can be applied
•Documents can be placed "on-hold" if they are part of an ongoing process
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Components of a Lifecycle Application
Lifecycle applications are a way to combine all the DocuNECT components together to map the document’s lifecycle. The components of the lifecycle app are:
Taxonomy – Taxonomy determines how documents are stored and accessed. In DocuNECT, the taxonomy is made up of a cabinet definition, roles and profiles. For information on the Taxonomy, refer to the Setting up a DocuNECT Taxonomy section.
Lifecycles – This determines how the document is initially captured and how the index values are assigned within the cabinet. Indexed manually or extracted from the content of the document. Rules also exist here for where the document is distributed to when it needs to be accessed by the user community. For more information, refer to the Creating Lifecycles section
Alerts, Actions and Status – Provides custom alerts, actions and status during the lifecycle.
Processes – If this indexing requires additional information from users and/or business applications a process can be assigned to the indexing stage. Either batch of documents, or individual documents, it can be put through the indexing workflow. For more information, refer to the Creating Workflow Processes section
Dashboards – DocuNECT has a dashboard that can be presented system-wide, to a role, or individual users. Dashboard present information, actions and documents to users that makes sense to their role within the business. For more information, refer to the Building Custom Dashboards section.
Data Tables – Data tables can be setup and managed from within DocuNECT, which can be used within Dashboards, ContentConnectors, Lifecycles and Cabinets components.
ContentConnectors – Underpinning all the actions performed on batches of documents during the capture stage of the lifecycle, or individual documents in the document management stage or workflow stage, ContentConnectors manage all the tasks. We have a wide range of connectors that manage many different functions, but custom connectors can be created to manage functions that are unique to a scenario. To create custom connector then refer to the Extending DocuNECT Functionality section
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