What is DocFusion?

Documents are critical to business

The importance of documents to business lies in their function. They record the transactions that take place between businesses and their internal or external stakeholders. Each transaction necessitates the creation of at least one formal business document, but the volume of documents generated during the course of business grows exponentially when many customers and other stakeholders are engaged daily. In practice then, the importance and volume of documents needed by enterprises creates a challenge to their operational efficiency. 

The problem of volume is further complicated by legalities and company policy. Each document a business issues is subject to statutory compliances, branding policy, and any number of additional requirements that govern the content, or presentation, of formal documents. These requirements are usually put in place to protect business interests from financial or reputational risks, which creates complexity in the assembly of content for even a single document. 

What is also not immediately apparent is that the information to include in a single document is often distributed across organizations. An invoice, for example, records information generated by salespeople but is issued by the Finance department, and the presentation thereof is governed by Marketing. Articulating various business units, and the information systems they command, is necessary to consistently produce accurate and compliant business documents in volume.

This is the business problem that DocFusion solves.

It is an enterprise software platform that functions by sourcing precise business data from enterprise systems and then dynamically consolidating it with approved document templates to produce accurate and compliant business documents at scale. As opposed to Document Management software products, which generally only store business documents, the span of DocFusion's functionality is referred to as Document Automation, and is critical to the efficiency and efficacy of any business.  

5 Functional areas of document automation

DocFusion solves a spectrum of challenges created by administratively-intensive organizations. These include:

1. Document Generation: The ability to dynamically generate documents in a variety of formats using intelligent templates and data in existing enterprise systems.
2. Electronic Signing: The ability to capture signatures in electronic documents and compose the document's meta-data so that they are legally compliant.
3. Version-Control: The organization of document templates that maintains its lifecycle along with approvals, access control, and a secure audit trail.
4. Document Workflows: The intelligence to make the correct documents available at the right time, and with content integrity, during the execution of a business process, and thereafter flowing the document to secure enterprise storage systems.
5. API (Application Programmer Interface): Software interfaces that allow enterprise systems to quickly integrate with, and use, the functionality of document automation systems like DocFusion through low-code or no-code.

Only Microsoft Office skills are needed

Designing intelligent document templates is an important part of document automation since it serves as the basis upon which enterprise data is merged with business process rules. 

DocFusion Template Designer simplifies the task by making itself available as an add-in to the familiar office application, Microsoft Word. Users who are familiar with common word-processing functionality can begin automating business documents without the need to learn a completely new software tool.   

Simply dragging-and-dropping DocFusion Smart Parts facilitates the building of business intelligence into document templates. The accompanying DocFusion Workbench and Workflow Designer tools, which publish document templates and controls their use respectively, are as easy to use.

The DocFusion difference

Comparable document automation products are indeed useful. However, using individual software products to fulfill automation functions like document generation or electronic signing eventually contributes to the distribution of valuable business data. This makes it more challenging for enterprises to access relevant information to carry out their business processes. 

The greater risk of distributed data is that it hinders a single version of truth, or a unified dataset, to work from. This creates inefficiencies and costly errors in the content of business documents. To rectify this problem, businesses are forced to undertake systems integration projects that expend budget and take a long time to implement. 

In contrast, DocFusion maximizes the value of business data by making its services available to any enterprise system. The freshest data is sourced from the system in which it exists, thereby creating a basis for integration with no additional effort or cost. All the necessary tools for document automation are included in the DocFusion software suite to then apply as needed.