Finding solutions to your document problems - A discussion with Soren Hjorth.

In this article, we catch up with Formpipe’s very own Soren Hjorth, Business Solutions Consultant for ERP, to find out more about the important role that the BSG team play in our business, common trends and problems that prospective customers face and how Formpipe can help them overcome their documentation hurdles.

Hi Soren! Can you tell us a bit about BSG and the part that the team plays at Formpipe?

So the Business Solutions Group (BSG) primarily focuses on supporting the sales team as technical support. The byproduct of being engaged in demos or Proof Of Concepts (POCs) enables us to get a feel for what customers and partners are looking for. This is something I really appreciate, as without this opportunity, I believe we could end up in a bubble and miss out on identifying essential requirements and trends in the industry. Secondly, we work with our product team in Formpipe and pass on the really useful things that we see and hear and discuss improvements to our current product line. It’s a unique position that allows us to look at what we do from both an external and internal angle.

So based on your experience what are some of the current trends in the market?

We are currently seeing lots of requests around automating, simplifying, and optimizing your document creation, in order to be able to focus on the actual business at hand! Often we get questions like ‘I wish there was an easier way to do this..’,  or ‘we’re spending so much time trying to get our system to follow this process’. Ultimately people (and businesses) just want to spend less time on IT and more time focusing on their customers and sales, or working on developing / evolving their own products. It shouldn’t be rocket science right?

So how does Lasernet address this issue then?

From the perspective of our platform, we can start at the beginning of a document creation process. We’ve had what we call the Query Wizard for many years. This is a tool that, by using a few simple questions, guides you to find, sort, and present data in a user-friendly way. This removes the need for exposing data in your Microsoft ERP or CE environments and doesn’t require you to be a developer, to add this data to your stream.

From a cost perspective, you no longer need the most expensive IT resources to create your business document. This, in turn, frees up those resources to focus on more challenging tasks that could help you get the edge in your line of business.

But let's not stop there. What if you take this process a step further? What if you no longer need to know where the data is located in the database, but instead, by typing simple text strings, you can now get the wizard to discover your data and add that to the query intelligently?

Now, you’ve removed the need for IT to have to process these requests and moved the power back to the business. This generally results in very rapid cost savings and internal business process optimization.

I could go on and on talking about how we can help your digital transformation by simplifying your file system footprint, integrating to third-party platforms like MS Customer Portals, and adding digital signatures/approvals before sending documents to a vendor or customer, to name but a few, but I’ll stop there for now!

When speaking to prospective customers and partners, what problems do you find most people tend to get stuck on?

Report queries can become quite complex, involving multiple tables, database joins, filtering, etc., leading to slower performance and more prolonged troubleshooting when things go awry. The queries often start pretty simple, but as the business requirements evolve (often over time), they become a patchwork of changes. Again, our product team looked at that challenge and developed a tool that will compare your query with what’s actually being used in the form design, allowing you to quickly identify what can be removed or optimized in your report for better performance. On top of that, you will also be able to compare versions of the query created, allowing you to see exactly what table/field/expression was changed, when it was changed, and what the query looked like before the change. This shortens the troubleshooting time tremendously. The tool even allows you to run test scripts that automatically look at all of this for you, resulting in a shortened testing cycle after an upgrade or major change to your system.

One of the other major headaches for businesses is always new ISVs and the network/infrastructure footprint that they bring into the mix. I’ve worked with infrastructure, network/security, compliance, and general operations for most of my career so I know that the struggle is real! Usually, it adds more servers, patching, monitoring, etc., and the operations team ends up with the bulk of the added overhead – the department that the business is actively looking to reduce pressure on! Here at Formpipe we are constantly challenging ourselves to see if we can simplify the impact on IT by having our platform do more, but with less overhead. That manifests itself in the way we design our software, how we implement and deploy our solutions and how we provide support, resources and training to everyone that comes into contact with the platform. Our goal is to make things better and easier, not harder.

If you could offer some advice to companies out there that are wondering how to approach an output and document management project, what would it be?

We often get called in when businesses move or upgrade to a new ERP system. If you currently find yourself in this position, or will be very soon, please, please, please don’t leave it till the last minute before you think about your customer communications! Get us involved early and really take advantage of all of our knowledge. We have been doing this for so long and across so many industries, that I think we’ve come across every combination of input and output data, from just about every system out there.

Probably more importantly though, and this is irrespective of which vendor you choose, I would strongly encourage customers and partners to look at more than just the document creation. Whilst it’s vital that the tools are easy and intuitive to use, you should always try and think about the complete document journey and how the solution can support that.

Things like, where does your data reside? How can you retrieve it? Do you need to manipulate and enhance it? What happens with your documents after they are sent? Does your business or industry have any compliance requirements? What is the overall IT infrastructure footprint for your entire project? Above all, how can you, as a business owner or manager, automate and simplify the steps so that your staff can focus on what’s important for the business, rather than constantly dealing with system limitations and issues?

There is a lot to think about, and we can help to guide you every step of the way, but try to think ‘beyond the document’ to the customer journeys and workflow processes that are unique to your business. I promise you that your project will run more smoothly if you prepare yourself early and not leave your customer documents to chance!

So what does the future hold for BSG?

We always keep one eye firmly fixed on the future, to ensure we can anticipate our customers needs and also remain both relevant and competitive. Alongside the potential use of AI in some of our processes, we have also been looking at blockchain to store and verify the authenticity of a document. This could have a huge impact for both business and personal data, and lead to a more secure digital future, where your dental, medical, or legal documents can be securely stored on the blockchain, leaving only one authentic, verified version of these critical documents.

Whilst this may be a little way off yet, there are still plenty of cool things we do right now that you might not be aware of. If you get a chance, check out some of the ‘Did you know’ videos, as I think you might be surprised what is actually possible with Lasernet!

From the 15th-20th October, Soren will join our North American team at the North American Community Summit event taking place in Charlotte, North Carolina at Booth 1635 to highlight how Lasernet and Autoform DM can solve your Document Management challenges across Dynamics F&O, CE and Business Central.

For more details about the event click here!