Top 5 Full Real-Life File Management Examples in 2024

~79% of organizations say digitalization is critical to their survival (see Figure 1). The use of digital technology by a company to digitize and digitalize non-digital items, business operations, or services is referred to as digital transformation. 

Figure 1: 79% of organizations think digital transformation is key to survival.¹

Digitizing physical documents, or transforming them to digital documents, can help in digital transformation. However,  

• ~30% of employees’ workdays were lost searching for documents/information.

Document management software can assist employees with finding, organizing, and processing documents. However, only less than half of corporate executives fully understand the distinction between file management systems.² 

In this article, we examine five real-world examples of file management systems applications in a variety of industry contexts.

Banking

1. Content services assist in document management in banking

Business Challenge

BNP Paribas is a multinational banking organization. BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions provides financial services for procurement and technological equipment. The company was challenged with handling:³

• Lost
• Destroyed
• Unavailable documents

The company’s plan to solve this problem was to set up central and secure file storage to store files like leasing documents. 

With this aim, the company expected to:

• Digitize its paper documents, reduce paper costs, and increase sustainability. (see Video 1).
• A platform for integrating data from its diverse global banking inputs.
• A technology to capture and classify information from unstructured documents.

Video 1: The difference between digitalization and digitization 

Solution

BNP Paribas leveraged content services (CS) from a third-party vendor. The CS platform offered: 

• A centralized platform for employees to securely share and access files from global sources online.
• Document capture and image processing technology to extract information from unstructured documents.
• Automatic classification to store files on the CS platform to decrease document search time
• Using data from visual and textual documents, dashboards for monitoring activities with visualization.

Results

After the implementation of the CS platform, BNP Paribas:

• Reduced the need for paper documents by digitizing them through document capture(see Video 2).
• Stored files on a single platform and increased the accessibility of ~1500 users in about seven countries to its files.
• Enhanced file management capabilities like a searchable database to search and organize files and documents reduced document search time.
• Reduced IT expenses due to a decline in file server storage and usage.
• Enabled analysis of unstructured data with visualizations.

Video 2: Document digitization concepts explained through the healthcare industry.

Car rental services

2. Content management services and intelligent automation assist in document processing and management

Business challenge

Fleet Hire Services is a car rental company offering services to other companies in the U.K. area. Fleet Hire Services followed the following steps to rent a car:

1. The team had to put information about the client into their main rental system and print a rental contract and a damage check sheet to rent a car.
2. After this, the rental company needed to deliver the paper documents to clients so they could sign them and collect them back to archive them.
3. During the archiving, the team needed to scan the documents to upload them to the archive and change the car’s status. 

Fleet Hire Services is challenged with:⁴

• Manually processing ~11,500 rental contracts and related documents by printing, physically delivering, and scanning.
• Manually entering rented car information such as color, license number, and engine number into their core rental system. The manual entering information was:
  •  time-consuming
  •  prone to error

Initiative

Fleet Hire Services leveraged third-party enterprise file management software and an intelligent document capture tool.

Enterprise content management (ECM) software is a file management tool. ECM, a file management tool, lets a large enterprise find, store, organize, and manage files, allowing users easy retrieval of files and documents.

On the other hand, the intelligent document capture tool classifies and extracts information from unstructured documents.

With the ECM platform in place, the company started to use rental contracts with barcodes.

When Fleet Hire Services scanned the signed barcoded documents, the intelligent document capture tool extracted critical information from the document and inserted it into the rental management system (see Figure 2). 

Figure 2: Barcoded document example ⁵

Additionally, the system provided status checks about rental cars like “being delivered,”  “being collected,” or “the paperwork has not yet been returned,” increasing the visibility of rental services.

Also, the system provided a simpler interface for users to manage rental contracts, reducing the efforts.

Results

With the use of ECM and an intelligent document capture tool, Fleet Hire Services: 

• Eliminated the need to manually enter rental car information into their core rental system and saved employees time.
• Reduced the efforts in file management with an easy-to-use user interface (UI).
• Employees were more able to focus on customer interaction and investing in customer loyalty.
• Saved ~£1200 monthly from taxes. The company was able to use vehicle logbooks more efficiently to determine taxability due to increased automation and visibility.

Finance

3. Content services assist in the document and email management

Business Problem

Hawksford Group is a company that helps organizations with their finances. Hawksford creates, receives, and manages many documents in the regulated financial services industry. The company was challenged with:⁶

• Processing paper documents 
• Wasting time searching for documents
• Duplicate files
• Managing about 170,000 emails monthly

This made it harder for the company to provide good customer service and meet regulatory requirements.

Solution

Hawksford Group collaborated with a third-party content services (CS) platform. CS platforms can be used as file management tools.

The CS platform integrated their systems for business process management and offered solutions for (see Figure 3):

• Document management, like email management.
• Administrative tasks like client billing and email management.

Figure 3: CS services use cases percentages.

Results

The use of a third-party CS platform enabled Hawksford to:

• Reduce paper costs and manual efforts with the digitization of paper documents.
• Reduce document and email search time by ~82% with the platform’s new document search features and naming conventions.
• Improve client satisfaction by:
  • Saving 10 minutes from the preparation of standard bills with minimum changes. 
  • Producing bills without changes in 3 minutes.

Insurance

4. Content services assist in bill processing in the insurance sector

Business Challenge

Central Nacional Unimed (CNU) sells business medical treatment plans, special benefits, and specialized care to companies. Every month, the companies’ analysts are challenged with largely manual analysis of:⁷

• ~1.3 million bills 
• ~120,000 supporting documents 

to decide how many days, services, and supplies were used in treatment to decide whether CNU will pay the whole bill, a portion of it, or deny it.

Solution

CNU aimed to improve bill processing efficiency and accuracy. CNU sought a solution to:

• Digitize its documents
• Automate its workflows

As a solution, CNU implemented a third-party agent’s content management system. 

The CMS offered:

• A centralized repository to access bills.
• A document capture software to scan their physical files and documents and turn them into machine-readable digital files. 
• Data extraction from digital files to be analyzed in automated workflows. 
• Automated workflows for analysis. For example, automated workflows segmented the information in scanned medical bills, such as hospital procedures and prices. 

Results

With the implementation of the CMS platform, CNU:

• Reduced the time required for bill analysis by 35% and bill processing by 10%.
• Reduced administrative costs by 90%.
• Enabled analysts to work on the same documents simultaneously.

Railroad transportation

5. Content management services assist in payroll and invoice management

Business challenge

Ferservizi provides support services to Italy’s primary railway operator. The railway operator relied on Ferservezi’s back-office processes to run its business operations. However, Ferservezi had difficulty processing the following:⁸

• ~63,000 employees payrolls every month 
• ~400,000 invoices per year

Ferservezi aimed to digitize invoices and handle them on one platform to solve this problem. With this aim, the company expected:

• Reduce paper costs by digitizing invoices and payroll slips
• Increase productivity in processing invoices and payrolls:
  • By reducing manual efforts in the preparation of payroll checks and invoices with the help of a file management platform.
  • By Integrating SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and SAP Payroll Processing (PP) on a centralized repository.

Solution

Ferservezi implemented a content management system through a third-party agent.

A content management system (CMS) can be a file management system, allowing multiple users:

• To create new files, folders, and documents
• To change file organization
• File sharing
• To manage electronic files/digital documents from a central repository

Results

With the implementation of CMS, Ferservezi managed to:

• Process ~400,000 invoices and around ~1 million paychecks digitally every year.
• Increased accuracy in processing invoices and paychecks.
• Saved about €2 million per year from paper, ink, and postage costs in the first year.
• Integrated SAP ERP and  PP on a single repository.
• Imported medical records and employment information like holiday allowances to the content management system to improve employee access to company information.
• Boosted employee productivity by 30% by reducing manual efforts and increasing their accessibility to information.

If you have further questions about best file management practices, please get in touch with us at:

External Links

• 1. AIM
• 2. See footnote 1
• 3. Intalio
• 4. IBM
• 5. The South African
• 6. OpenText
• 7. IBM
• 8. IBM