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This blog is a recap of March’s Live Ask the Process Professor session: Define, Generate & Customize Documents with Bizagi
Documents are a fundamental part of doing business. Perhaps you’re working on a Purchase Request, where quotations, invoices, or purchase orders are indispensable for correct execution. Or you’re working in HR on an onboarding process where the job application form, the benefits forms, and even the contract are all essential. Documents are the protagonists in these processes and must be treated with reverence.
We have been living in a world constrained by a global pandemic for more than two years now. All our daily routines changed dramatically from one day to another, and companies unprepared for this challenge were left behind. Those that depended on paper-based processes with a high level of human interaction struggled to continue their operation due to the new restrictions of remote working. Although digital documents have been considered a best practice for some years now, they are now categorized as a business necessity to survive.
In the latest session for Bizagi’s Process Professor series, I shared how to take advantage of Bizagi’s Document Templates to generate and customize different types of documents required in various business processes. Read on for my top tips, or watch the webinar on-demand now.
A proper document digitization process is crucial to keeping your business on track. A recent study conducted by Forrester, How Digital Document Processes Are Shifting From Best Practice To Business Necessity, analyzed implications for companies with minimal digital document processes. According to the study, “Companies that exclusively use digital document processes are seeing 5x more improvement in maintaining business continuity than companies with minimal or no digital document processes.”
The last few years have also seen process automation evolve. When we pair automation with document digitization, we develop new strategies and approaches to manage documents more efficiently. Without these technologies, you risk falling behind.
Assess how digitally mature your company is by answering the following questions: How does your organization currently generate, control, and store documents? Does your company still have massive document storages locations? Did your company already start the evolution of paper-based processes? Is your company already fully digital?
Digital document processes are becoming an essential business need, and it comes with many benefits, including: • Accelerating document processing: Once your documents are fully digital, processing the information is much faster and also opens the door to include new technologies such as OCR (Optical Character Recognition) or AI (Artificial Intelligence)
• Improving employee collaboration: Often, documents require review, approval, and work from different departments to get to the final version. With paper-based documents, this is a considerable challenge and highly ineffective. Once documents are digital, they can flow smoothly from department to department, and employee collaboration increases significantly.
• Increase customer satisfaction: Any task that you can perform to bring better service to customers is an intelligent choice. If, as a company, you can decrease processing time, reduce errors and provide better and faster services to the customer’s satisfaction is guaranteed.
So, how can Bizagi help you in your document digitization journey? As the one platform for every process, we understand the importance of seamlessly passing information between business tasks and processes. Bizagi allows you to upload and store any required file within a process in our platform to offer an integrated digital experience.
We also offer Bizagi Document Templates. This feature provides an easy way to define, generate and customize documents using information already available in your processes. If at any moment you need to create a certificate, a supplier evaluation, or a policy document, Bizagi document templates will complete the task in an easy and agile way.
To create and use Document Templates, you must follow some basic steps:
1. Define your template: First, you need to define the template you need in your process. Bizagi supports Word, PDF, TXT, and Excel formats. Once you have selected the format, you can create the template using the respective application’s features.
For example, if you choose to use Word, you can customize headers, margins, font sizes, images, footers, formatted tables, your company logo etc. Remember to include template tags at this step. These are used to reference the information that will be dynamically obtained from your Bizagi process. The template tags must be defined within square brackets and without any space, for example, [CustomerName].
2. Include the template in Bizagi: Once the template is defined, you can include it in your Bizagi project. You must upload the format specified in step 1 and select where in your Bizagi data model you want to save the generated document.
3. Complete the configuration: As template tags were defined in step 1, you need to complete the mapping in step 3. On the left side of your screen you will see all information available in the process. On the right side, Bizagi will automatically display the template tags identified. Using the simple drag and drop interface, you can map the information.
4. Add the Template to your Process: Finally, you must decide where in the process to include your document yemplate. Bizagi offers the option to automatically generate the template without any human intervention or add the template in one of your activities forms. The document will obly be generated when an end-user clicks on a button in this last case.
With Bizagi Document Templates, the task of defining, generating, and customizing documents is now fast, easy, and even fun. Once you start generating your documents in this way, you will not stop.
If you’d like to hear more about Bizagi’s Document Templates, including their benefits, how to use them to their full advantage, and how to customize them to fit your specific needs, catch up with my Process Professor session now.
And don’t forget to sign up for the next Process Professor session.
Every month I take a deep dive into one of Bizagi’s key features in a live session, including a short demo, and answer any questions you have about the Bizagi platform.
