Document Workflows in Times of Digital Transformation: Go Digital or go Home

There have been many traditional companies, which have been overtaken by young enterprises coming from the purely digital side. One of the most prominent is traditional taxi versus services such as Uber and Lyft. Not only price differences facilitate such success. Another reason is the so-called “digital disruption”. New, digital business models and modern customer interfaces, which serve the needs of “digital natives”, have proven to have the potential of overtaking established and traditional companies that miss the opportunity to adapt.

Every second company fears digital disruption and needs to act upon it

51% of all companies fear digital disruption for their business, according to a study  by AIIM supported by ABBYY in 2018 (State of Intelligent Information Management: Getting Ahead of the Digital Transformation Curve). AIIM questioned hundreds of small to large companies in all industries from North America (50%) and worldwide: According to their research, companies worldwide have to develop strategies to deal with the changing environment. For 81% of the respondents companies’ digital transformation is the key factor for getting ahead of the digital disruption.

Applied digital transformation strategies and PDF documents

Interestingly enough, “digitizing the core business processes” is still the most important part of this digital transformation strategy for 31% of the questioned companies. Closely followed by “modernizing the information toolkit” with 29% and “automating compliance and governance” with 27% of the organizations. This shows that still a lot has to be done inside the organization to make the digital transformation truly happen and allow organizations to interact in a fast, smart and digital manner with their customers.

However, what does “digitizing core business processes” actually mean? Following the digital transformation, more and more paper-based processes have been replaced by digital workflows and the paper document is told to have become a rare breed in the office environment. Still – one needs documents. A common specimen of this digital variety is the PDF document, because of its easy portability and compact build. PDF as a format has a lot of the positive characteristics of a paper document: it can be handed around, viewed universally by free viewing software, and is in the first place static in its layout.

The right toolkit for digital document workflows - as essential as a keyboard

However, our office workers may want to actually work with the document. They would like to comment and collaborate, to reorganize it, compare it, or even edit it. That is where tools like ABBYY FineReader come into the equation. With a professional PDF Software like FineReader you have a lot more options for interacting with your PDF documents. Additionally FineReader combines PDF functionality with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. With OCR even those last of the existing or incoming paper documents can be brought fully-featured into the digital workflow. In addition, if there is too much of a paper trail there is always FineReader Server to automate the digitalization.

Finding a smart digital solution for your enterprise not only includes company-wide content management but starts at every single desk. As much as office workers nowadays need a keyboard, they also need a software solution for personal productivity, which allows work and collaboration with all types of documents. That is why the digital transformation has to happen not only top-down but also bottom-up to result in truly intelligent information management and facilitate true impact on productivity.