Five ways your business can save time with content automation

Using automation increases your operational efficiency and ensures the consistency of your end-products and services. A study by Unit 4 revealed that globally, office workers spend 69 days a year on administrative tasks, costing companies $5 trillion a year. With less time spent on tedious, manual tasks that can be automated, more time can be spent on other tasks that need your strategic attention rather than as a matter of process – potentially increasing productivity by 40%.

In this blog, we’ll show you five ways content automation can save you time, get your products to market faster, and immediately significantly reduce your production costs.

Saving time with content automation

Content is critical to businesses in regulatory and document-heavy operations. For example, Manufacturing Records Books (MRBs) are necessary for operating any plant or machinery within the oil and gas industry. These documents describe the materials, processes, and companies which are involved in the manufacturing of the products. Being such complex documents, compiling each of these books can take weeks or even months of labor when done manually, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is just one example of how something essential to running a business can take up an immense amount of time if not automated. 

Thankfully, with solutions like GCI Document Publishing, you can automate critical content tasks that will save your company thousands of hours in productivity. Below, we’ll outline five functions that help you do just that.

Automated workflows

Automated workflows put the right task in front of the right person at the right time. With GCI Controlled Document Lifecycle, your document controllers have the right tools to help them achieve more, better, and faster.

Taking the opportunity to automate manual tasks will further optimize your organization’s processes. Considering the example of automated MRBs, Global Cents Document Publishing solution turn weeks and months of work into a few days, providing faster turn-around, more accurate results, and a compelling advantage in beating competitors within the market.  Now add a controlled document review and approval process offered by the Controlled Document Lifecycle solutions, what once took hundreds of hours to complete now only requires a few hours. 

Not only is time saved on these tasks, but more employees are available to focus their energy on other critical business details in a structured, transparent, and organized manner thanks to automated workflows and document assembly process. 

Document assembly capabilities

Using content automation tools ensures accuracy and consistency within the compilation of complex documents. They enable you to add styling, formatting, structure, and more directly within the document production processes. Standardizing these elements of document assembly and removing manual errors ensures regulatory compliance. This saves your organization budget, time, and boosts your organization’s reputation for quality. 

By implementing an automated, templated approach to document assembly, you can get accurate, complex documentation ready faster than ever. GCI Document Publishing is an excellent example of an automated content creation solution for OpenText Content Suite and Extend ECM Platforms.

Automated reporting

The reporting process in any business strategy is essential in pinpointing issues and improvements where needed. Through automating your reporting system, you can limit the resources necessary to create intuitive and actionable reports. With automation, you can schedule your reports to be run daily, weekly, or any time you want through a convenient channel for your users. All your reports can be set to be delivered directly to you, wasting no time between when the report is made and the receipt of it. 

GCI’s PowerTools for Reports and Views is a great example for OpenText Content Suite and Extend ECM Platforms. The solutions break down complex individual queries into insightful statements to be actioned quickly and effectively. By combining data from multiple sources into one reporting document, your analysis of the situation becomes more thorough and more transparent. 

You can now monitor every project’s activity to enhance your business decisions with existing company data and integrations with third parties such as OpenText and SAP.

Review and revision tools

Over time, there is always one constant, things change.  Documents are no exception.  Periodic reviews for published documents are necessary. Based on the document type, reviews need to be done at least one or two times a year. By automating the notification and review process, you will be able to optimize your document review strategy for better productivity and reliability. 

GCI Controlled Document Lifecycle automates this process allowing specific workflows to be initiated depending on the type of document. You can set the review outcomes to renew documentation with no changes required, retire it if it is no longer needed or revise certain sections that need updating. Automated workflows ensure that the right stakeholder is notified and ready to edit documentation as required before sending it on for approval and sign-off, streamlining your content operations.

Document publishing

Documents exist for recording information. At some point, the data needs to be released to the people who need access to it. This is the perfect example of a manual task that can be automated to save time and resources. With automated solutions, published and signed-off documents are automatically converted to PDF, stored in a secure archive, and given read-only access to users by default.

Content automation solutions are also significant assets to help create and publish large business documents like MRBs. Solutions such as GCI’s Controlled Document Lifecycle and Document Publishing enables contract assembly, creation of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in the correct format, as needed and ready to go.

You can also quickly collate and structure your complex documentation to span multiple volumes and automatically generate separator pages, tables of contents, internal bookmark links and footers in the correct place.

Through automating the publishing process, the review and approval cycle for documents that are already published becomes a less time-consuming, more reliable, and accurate operation.

In conclusion

By automating your content processes, you can focus time and resources on other critical business details. The manual process of compiling, publishing, and reviewing documents, consists of many small components which take a lot of work from multiple people. As such, it often draws focus away from things that need more attention for your business to thrive. 

By using GCI Controlled Document Lifecycle and Document Publishing solutions, you will take advantage of all the perks of content automation. Through dedicated PowerTools, GCI allows you to enjoy the seamless and time-saving process of content automation. For all your document needs, use the solution from Global Cents, which has proven time and again to help businesses save time and resources.