Studies show that if business operations are not running like clockwork, poor document management is to blame around 33% of the time. If goods don’t have a shipping label they can’t be shipped, and someone has to spend time working out what went wrong.

Document management, however, is generally not one of the top priorities for businesses going through transformation; they are focused on getting their core processes right. Downstream activities, such as printing documents, are often something that project teams least want to think about. If complaint forms or credit memo forms are not ready before the new system goes live, they are simply cobbled together at the last minute.

Companies can come to regret this, at the latest when they try to modernize their IT infrastructures and find that they have to convert non-standard forms into standard ones. This is especially tricky if they are still using older formats that are coming to the end of their lifecycle and can’t keep up with the latest advances in electronic form technology.