It’s no secret that being a manufacturer has a lot of challenges right now. With global, geo-political economic pressures, supply chain disruptions, and talent shortages – manufacturers have a lot of shifting obstacles. According to World Economic Forum, to address these challenges, "the top three strategic priorities of [manufacturers] across all industries and regions are productivity, sustainability and resilience." While documentation may seem like a small piece of the puzzle, it is one of the largest drains on resources – directly impacting productivity margins. So, as we think about how documentation creation and management can help our customers improve productivity, we hear three common themes:
It is a well-known fact that finding the right data is a challenge all businesses face.
According to a McKinsey report, "employees spend 1.8 hours every day - 9.3 hours per week, on average - searching and gathering information." When building documents like personalized account statements, international shipping paperwork, or product/material specific documentation, there are many sources of information that the employee needs to compile in order to build accurate content. Manufacturers have been relying on QMS, ERP, and CRM systems to house and store data, but getting the data out can be a major challenge and often requires multiple licenses to expensive software solutions. In AIIM’s 2023 study of information availability, "Only 26% of document, content, and record management systems integrate with other core applications." Because of this, a lot of organizations turn to contractors or expensive in-house documentation specialists to build document templates, then rely on individuals to hand-populate specific details. This is then housed in a homegrown folder-based archive that can be a challenge to navigate or search.
We recently helped our customer solve this challenge. Our customer, Steel Warehouse had a similar challenge with housing documents in a centralized access point. They leveraged 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 organizations, building documents is a part of doing business and is considered an operating cost. A recurring conversation we have with customers is about how they can avoid and reduce administrative costs associated with document creation.
With customers now demanding personalized documentation and the data ecosystem becoming more complex, "many companies are seeing the share of general and administrative (G&A) costs increase. From 2008 to 2015, G&A expenses grew more slowly than revenues (41.8 percent versus 61 percent). Since then, the trend has reversed, with G&A expenses rising faster - 15.4 percent compared with 6.0 percent revenue growth… Drawing on the latest McKinsey research and a series of interviews with experts and industry leaders, we believe there is a way to do better, faster: tech-enabled rapid reduction of indirect costs. By indirect costs, we mean those separate from the direct process of manufacturing goods or offering services. Instead, they are shared across the company and are largely fixed."
One major use case we see across our manufacturing and banking customers is the need to compile personalized account data. We have utility, banks, and manufacturing customers who have realized up to 90% productivity gains on routine account statement generation activities saving time, money, and IT computing resources.
And probably the most important recent trend, a lot of customers are recognizing the value of correct documentation.
Documentation is mission critical to you and your customer. We often over-simplify the importance of documents, but they can impact your company’s revenue in these key areas:
While this may seem like a daunting task, but we have over 30 years of solving for these universal document challenges. We have designed the Lasernet platform to help our customers navigate these challenges and turn their documents into profit generating assets. With out of the box data integration tools, comprehensive archiving, and drag and drop editors, we are constantly identifying new ways to help our customers solve documentation problems.
Curious to learn more and see this in action – book a personalized demo with one of our solution engineers to see how we can help you. Or – don’t take our word for it, check out how Lasernet has helped our customers.