It’s no secret that manufacturers are facing a lot of challenges right now. With global economic pressures, geopolitical uncertainty, supply chain disruption and talent shortages, manufacturers have plenty of shifting obstacles to manage.
According to the World Economic Forum, the top three strategic priorities for manufacturers across industries and regions are productivity, sustainability and resilience. While documentation may seem like a small piece of the puzzle, it can be one of the largest drains on resources and has a direct impact on productivity margins.
When we look at how document creation and management can help manufacturers improve productivity, three common themes come up.
Finding the right data is a challenge most businesses face.
According to a McKinsey report, employees spend 1.8 hours every day, or 9.3 hours per week on average, searching for and gathering information.
When building documents such as personalised account statements, international shipping paperwork or product and material-specific documentation, employees often need to compile information from several sources to create accurate content. Manufacturers rely on QMS, ERP and CRM systems to house and store data, but extracting that data can be difficult and often requires multiple licences for expensive software solutions.
In AIIM’s 2023 study of information availability, only 26% of document, content and record management systems were found to integrate with other core applications. Because of this, many organisations turn to contractors or expensive in-house documentation specialists to build document templates, then rely on individuals to manually populate specific details. The final documents are often stored in homegrown, folder-based archives that can be difficult to navigate or search.
We recently helped one of our customers solve this challenge. Steel Warehouse faced a similar issue with housing documents in a centralised access point. They used Lasernet to build a searchable documentation portal that both customers and employees could use to find compliance, quality and product documentation.
But gaining access to the right information is just the start of the documentation process.
For many organisations, building documents is part of doing business and is often treated as an operating cost. A recurring conversation we have with customers is how they can reduce the administrative costs associated with document creation.
With customers now demanding personalised documentation and data ecosystems becoming more complex, many companies are seeing general and administrative costs increase. According to McKinsey, from 2008 to 2015, G&A expenses grew more slowly than revenues, but since then the trend has reversed, with G&A expenses rising faster than revenue growth. McKinsey highlights tech-enabled reduction of indirect costs as one way industrial companies can respond.
One major use case we see across our manufacturing and banking customers is the need to compile personalised account data. Our utility, banking and manufacturing customers have realised up to 90% productivity gains on routine account statement generation activities, saving time, money and IT computing resources.
Another important trend is that more customers are recognising the value of correct documentation.
Documentation is mission-critical to both you and your customers. It is easy to oversimplify the importance of documents, but they can directly impact revenue in several key areas.
This may seem like a daunting task, but we have more than 30 years of experience solving these universal document challenges. The Lasernet platform is designed to help customers turn documents into profit-generating assets, with out-of-the-box data integration tools, comprehensive archiving and drag-and-drop editing.
Curious to see this in action? Book a personalised demo with one of our solution engineers to see how we can help. Or, see how Lasernet has helped our customers.