If you think document
assembly is the right technology for you and you'd like to roll it out to your
business, be prepared. There's one question that always comes up, and you'll
need a good answer.
"What's the business
case?"
This question is the
corporate equivalent of "show me the money" and your answer will need
to be a little bit more elaborate than simply declaring that "it's
great".
There are three scenarios
where the document assembly business case is particularly strong. If your
business fits any of these, you should have a good shot at making things
happen. If not, try to find a part of the business that does.
Business Case #1 -
Bottlenecks are losing you sales
This one is pretty
obvious. If you need to produce written proposals, letters or contracts to
close a sale, and there are bottlenecks somewhere in your process, then you are
probably losing sales. A classic case is where final sales contracts must be
drafted or approved by legal, but legal is so snowed under that some deals get
stuck for weeks. Even if the sales team is allowed to create some documents
themselves, the amount of time wasted cutting and pasting in Word means less
time out selling and less time to grow the pipeline. And the longer it takes to
close a deal, the greater the risk that your customer will shop around for a
better one. Fixing these problems should have a clear and measurable pay-off
that even the cynics will love.
Business Case #2 -
Non-compliance means pain
There are rules for just
about everything we do, and sometimes, it hurts if you break them. Each year,
legislators pump out thousands of new laws, and regulators pump out thousands
of new regulations. So, if you work in a heavily regulated business, and you
need to produce contracts and other documents that comply with all the rules,
then document assembly can make your life a whole lot easier (and a whole lot
less painful, too). A classic case is deleting the wrong clause and finding
yourself in non-compliance. It's all about the pain, really. If a botched
document has a probability of X and causes Y pain, the business case will be
pretty clear.
Business Case #3 - Costs
high, margins squeezed
This last scenario has two
important ingredients. First you must have high document costs, typically
because everything is being drafted by hand. And second, you must care. When
costs are high, but someone else is paying, who really cares? High costs are
only a problem when you can't easily pass them on to someone else. Which is why
document assembly only really appeals to lawyers and other professionals who
are facing margin squeeze? If your clients start asking for fixed prices, and
your margins start to disappear, the case for document assembly is very strong.
It might be the difference between staying in that line of business (and still
making money), and losing it altogether.
For more information on document assembly
software , word
merge software tool and document
automation generation software please Visit: http://www.relatetech.com/2011/10/12/sanlam-cut-contract-generation-time-hours-minutes/
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