Technology has continuously transformed organizations' way to think, learn, perform, and manage the processes. It's a routine discussion for many organizations to optimize, improve, or digitalize the manual processes and methods to lead in the ever-changing digital world. 

The digital transformation has proven its benefits in many leading organizations with customer satisfaction, resource productivity, operational management, cost reduction, accuracy, data security, and more. 

The organizations are in a race to adopt the most sophisticated automating process, but "Document Management Lifecycle" is a challenge to develop a 100% digital approach to business.

Here, I am trying to facilitate the challenge with OutSystems Capabilities. Let's start by understanding the typical lifecycle first -

The lifecycle initiates with the Document Creation. A document enters into any business process either by creating it or capturing it. The document owner either generate any file using drafting tools like MS Office, Google Docs, etc. or capture it through Emails, Image, OCR, any scanner.

Once the document is in process, the system requires to manage it with decent storage. So, the team can quickly find it, retrieve it with the versions and details when needed.

In the larger cubes, the document may need to share with the different users to check, review, or access, and they may require to collaborate inside the doc with some inputs!

Once the document is ready, it gets signed and finalized the terms and usage. The business could use the final documents to extract critical information for the process digitalization. No matter which industry you're in, I'm sure document processing and lifecycle is an essential part of your back-office functions.

How OutSystems Helps To Digitalize End-To-End Process?

OutSystems is a low-code web, apps, and software development platform. It accelerates application development with controlling the whole lifecycle: development, quality assurance, deployment, monitoring and management. The OutSystems Developers community of +415K MEMBERS created reusable apps and component repository to kick-start your app development. A few forge components are useful for Digital Document Processing as below: 

Document Creation

1. If you have documents from the third party, you can use simple File Upload to add the file in your online application. 
2. If you have to capture the data in a file, there are several cases:

• Use OCR to capture text from the image.
• Use Document Scanner to scan the file from edge to edge.
• To capture information from Emails, you can use Email Parser. 

Document Management & Access

When it comes to Manage the documents, it needs to Store all company documents in online store, upload or version the documents, find documents quickly that you need, share documents with other users, and organize them well. You can use the Documents to automate this functionality.

Document Collaboration

The document collaboration depends on the level of usage & required features. 

1. If you have specific templates of the document, then a Text Editor could collaborate in the file content. 
2. You can create some patterns / UI based on your templates. Then,
3. The data could be saved in PDF using Html2PDF convertor.
4. If you want a rich collaboration experience: the Google Drive, SharePoint, or OneDrive could be integrated easily with OutSystems.

Document Finalization

DocuSign's component enables to integrate the Digital Signature in apps that hold the same legal weight as a physical signature. It has greater efficiency and enhanced security to replace physical signatures in the virtual digital process. 

Finally, The Document Processing

When the document is finally ready, and if you still need human intervention to validate your documents, you'll always lag behind. Use the Document Processor to extract the most critical information from your document and easily access it anywhere to win the race.

So that is a contribution from OutSystems in Digital Transformation to accelerate the manual process into a 100% digital approach. The forges can help to develop such apps in a few weeks and maintain organizational competitiveness and scalability.