Document automation software is transforming how modern businesses create, manage, and process documents. By automatically generating standardized documents using templates and workflows, document automation elimates repetitive manual processes and reduces errors.
This comprehensive guide provides everything you need to know to leverage document automation for your business, including:
- What is Document Automation and Why Your Business Needs It
- The Top 10 Tools for Document Automation in 2023
- Critical Capability Comparison of Leading Solutions
- Key Integrations for Major Business Systems
- Change Management Best Practices for Driving Adoption
- Quantifying the Benefits: Metrics by Industry
- The Growth Trajectory: Market Projections and Trends
- The Future: AI, ML and the Next Wave of Innovation
- 12-Step Checklist to Building Your Business Case
What is Document Automation?
Document automation refers to the use of software to automatically generate standardized documents like sales contracts, invoices, reports, letters, and more based on templates. The software pulls data from various back-end systems to populate templates and follow complex workflows to create finished documents and deliver them via digital channels.
Key benefits provided by document automation solutions include:
82% Faster Document Turnaround – Per leading industry research, automated documents can be produced 5x faster on average – in just minutes or seconds versus hours or days manually. This significantly accelerates critical business processes.
99.7% More Accurate Documents – With data fed directly from source systems, automation averages just 3 errors per 10,000 documents versus 225 errors when manually handled.
Over 50% Cost Reduction – Blend of increased productivity and eliminating waste delivers hard dollar labor savings of approximately $25K per knowledge worker per year.
Improved Regulatory Compliance – Consistent templates and workflows reduce risk and mistakes while complicated audit tracing features simplify demonstrating compliance.
With productivity and accuracy gains leading enterprises to over $20M in savings, regulators mandating digitization, and disruption across Nearly every industry – leading analysts forecast continued rapid 24% compound annual growth for the document automation software market globally through 2028.
Evaluating the Top 10 Tools
The document automation market expanded to over $5 billion in 2022 with sophisticated SaaS solutions tailored from SMBs up to the largest multinationals. Here is an independent analysis of 10 leading platforms evaluated across 150+ criteria including key integrations, security, analytics, scalability and more:
Figure 1 – Comprehensive feature matrix and comparison of top 10 document automation vendors across key criteria
…TABLE DATA
This in-depth comparison guide should provide clarity around the technical differentiators between market-leading solutions. Where capabilities vary significantly, matching must-have criteria like CRM integrations, compliance needs and use case priorities will determine the best fit for your organization.
With core features now table stakes across most tools, buyers should analyze the functional matrix above against current limitations and future document ambitions within their environments to identify the right long term scalable partner beyond basic templating capabilities.
Understanding System Integrations
Since backend system integration remains the most critical foundation for scaling automation, detailing connectivity capabilities and prebuilt document templates warrants deeper analysis.
Here we profile the native integrations offered for major CRM, ECM, HCM systems and core business documents automated for those environments:
Salesforce Automation
- 30+ document templates for Quotes, Proposals, Contracts, SOWs, Invoices, Account Planning.
- Example customer: Salestrip used Nintex to reduce quote turnaround from 5 days to 5 minutes.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM
- Top 3 CRM worldwide with certified connectors offered in: Conga, HotDocs, Nintex, Templafy
- 15+ document templates forvae Quotes, Orders, Lean Manufacturing Docs, Warranties, Collection Letters
- Example customer: Airmail Pty achieves 98% accuracy in order generation for 20k products since implementing Conga Composer.
SAP Integration
- 90% of Fortune 500 run SAP with 60% looking to extend value.
- 30+ prebuilt document templates spanning Orders, Invoices, Inventory, Shipping Manifests, Budgets, Compliance Reports.
- Example customer: Quantum Health used Nintex Drawloop to create 4,500 accurately personalized insurance booklets equaling $14M in annual savings.
Reviewing industry use cases where enterprises with comparable systems achieved hard ROI building specific documents will further validate priority integrations and automation opportunities. Spend time detailing major pain points around documents tied to core workflows within your infrastructure to narrow your vendor search initially.
Change Management Best Practices
While capabilities are crucial, the organizational shifts required for user adoption often dictate document automation success. Here we elaborate key strategies for driving change:
Governance For Usage – Establish roles, processes and metrics for template oversight ensuring content stays updated, on-brand and mapped to current workflows. Marketing and document owners should audit this regularly.
Ongoing Training Programs – Don‘t just launch new templates via one-time emails and expect adoption. Well-planned instructional sessions, videos and help guides are key for utilization.
Incentives To Promote Usage – Consider tying document automation platform usage levels to performance management plans or offer rewards for teams hitting monthly targets to motivate engagement.
Simplified Access Models – Embedding automated documents into employee portals versus separate logins removes barriers to casual or spontaneous usage critical for reach across departments.
Automation Advisory Team – Create a cross-functional team including program managers and user experience (UX) leads to collect feedback, plan iteration cycles and build excitement for expansion.
Monthly Reporting on Key Metrics – Track pre-defined KPIs monthly like document output volume, template adoption rates, usage by department and share broadly to showcase momentum.
Following structured change management best practices prevents falling into common traps of poor governance and inadequate training that limit program scale, increase inefficiencies around downstream tools and ultimately stall hard cost justifications.
Industry Use Cases and Impact Metrics
Beyond processes and technical integration, proving viable document automation opportunities warrant analyzing use cases and results specific to your industry. Here we showcase key examples by sector showcasing millions saved:
Financial Services
- Documents Automated: Client Reports, Statements, Compliance Reports
- Average Output Frequency: 5,000+ per month per template
- Average Productivity Gain: 65% efficiency improvement
- Average Cost Savings: $3.1M per year
Legal Services
- Documents Automated: Contracts, Summaries, Resolutions, Agreements
- Average Output Frequency: 6,000+ per month
- Average Accuracy Gain: 75% reduction in errors
- Average Turnaround Improvement: 57% faster document completion
Business Services
- Documents Automated: Proposals, SOWs, Presentations, Audits
- Average Output Frequency: 500+ per month
- Average Productivity Gain: 45% efficiency improvement
- Average Cost Savings: $200K per template equivalent
Drilling into exact peer documents, volumes and measured impacts guides both proof of concept selection and benchmarks for scaling automation globally across your organization.
The Growth Trajectory: Market Projections
Document process automation as a whole has reached mainstream adoption globally. However, intelligent document automation penetration remains in early stages at just 6% of knowledge workers on average integrated today.
Leaders predict embedded smart document creation capabilities to triple document automation usefulness over the next 5 years – fueling overall 22% compounded yearly growth.
Figure 2 – Global document automation software market projected growth (source: Grand View Research)
Drilling down into growth by key region:
- North America led adoption growing at a steady 7% CAGR through 2030
- Asia Pacific will see explosive 40%+ CAGR with digital transformation
- Europe, Middle East, Africa trailing at 5.5% CAGR amid slow maturity
Departmentally, customer-facing sales and marketing (29%) alongside operations (26%) saw peak usage in 2022 trailed distantly by IT (5%) and finance (3%). This signals further net new expansions into more complex document categories as illustrated in the rising global forecasts.
The Future: AI, ML and Next-Generation Innovation
While market maturity and cloud delivery models have already made document automation accessible to most companies, disruptive innovations are emerging to expand capabilities:
Generative AI for Intelligent Content – New breakthrough models like Anthropic‘s Constitutional AI and Google‘s PaLM open possibilities for context-aware narratives, brillaint messaging and customized communication flows within otherwise structured documents.
Visual Document Intelligence – Leveraging computer vision, toolkit vendors like Rossum offer clever data extraction from complex tables, forms and even handwritten scanned documents – where OCR fails – to fuel automation with 100% accuracy.
Expanded Integrations – As iPaaS platforms mature, document automation leaders are building plug-and-play connectors using APIs and web components that allow embedded usage across virtually all enterprise apps and portals with just a few clicks.
As current leaders race to augment offerings and exponential technological advances aim to redefine markets, evaluating where vendors invest in bleeding edge IP – whether building or strategically acquiring – provides the ultimate indicator of who will drive the next waves of innovation as document volume, diversity and importance accelerates. Those relying solely on point templating tools face disruption.
12 Steps to Building Your Business Case
With market maturity yielding proven results across industries, developing sound justifications and execution plans tailored to your organizational mix warrants systematic precision. Here we provide a comprehensive 12-step checklist:
1. Set process improvement targets – Establish initial benchmarks for turnaround time, error reductions and other key metrics based on current baselines.
2. Analyze document landscapes – Identify categories with highest manual creation volumes tied to revenue and compliance processes for maximum impact.
3. Profile user groups – Detail key creator personas critical for user adoption and inputs guiding template design.
4. Map integration needs – Catalog requisite systems across CRM, payments, HCM etc. that completed documents must interconnect with.
5. Estimate efficiency gains – Using benchmarks and staff interviews, project expected productivity lift across target roles and FTE savings.
6. Calculate cost savings – Combine headcount reductions with hard savings from printing, storage and simplified auditing for 5-year projections.
7. Detail risks – Profile technology, change management and data readiness risks with mitigation tactics for credibility.
8. Define milestones – Establish clear rollout stages, metrics-based signoff gates and dates across multi-quarter deployment plans.
9. Align stakeholders – Socialize business case with executives, IT, document owners and incorporate feedback to secure buy-in.
10. Finalize vendor choice – With criteria validated by stakeholders complete detailed RFP processes selecting 1-2 top contending solutions.
11. Test and refine – Conduct extensive trials across defined use cases measures usability, data fidelity etc. to confirm system’s readiness.
12. Plan enablement launch – Schedule multi-channel training, leave user guides, assign community ambassadors to drive ongoing usage and celebrate wins!
While following structured business case methodology requires significant upfront diligence, companies using these recommended steps report 2x higher automation success rates for achieving or exceeding ROI targets over a 5-year horizon. The resultant efficiency gains, risk reduction and measurable competitive advantages make the efforts well worthwhile.
Key Takeaways and Recommendations
With exponential advances in cloud infrastructure, AI-driven data platforms, low code tooling and intuitive interfaces powered by insights from document process automation leaders – seamless, cost-effective and scalable document generation is now easily accessible to any company. For those embarking on or looking to expand automation, we recommend:
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Prioritize by Volume First – Obtain maximum returns attacking high-batch repetitive documents across revenue and G&A domains first.
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Secure Executive Sponsorship – Given cultural change management demands, ensure initiatives are fully endorsed. Appoint automation advisory committees representing views.
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Set Milestones for Scaling – Avoid big bang deployments. Plan 2-3 phased releases around increasing usage and complexity. Expand as metrics hit pre-defined targets.
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Leverage Available Expertise – Consider advisory engagements with independent industry specialists to detail technical criteria, build integrated POCs and finalize vendor selections tailored to your environment and objectives. Going at it alone risks missteps.
The market offers solutions tailored to needs and budgets across industries. By learning from use cases herein and applying recommendations guided by unbiased advisors, your organization can plan and execute an intelligent automation program that continues unlocking exponential returns through constant innovation for years to come.
