Today, many companies still use paper documents to distribute and capture information in production environments. This is especially true for documents such as production orders and quality inspection reports.
While the use of paper documents is often the most efficient way to operate in a closed environment, it can cause significant inefficiencies and challenges down the line.
Challenges in using paper documents
In essence, we can see three main challenges when it comes to using paper documents in certain areas of an organization:
- Accessibility
With paper documents, it can be difficult for teams across the organization to quickly locate and access the information or data they need. This can be especially problematic in a fast-paced operations environment where time is of the essence. - Efficiency
Paper documents require manual handling, physical storage, and time-consuming searches when information is needed later. This takes valuable time away from your resources and reduces the overall efficiency of your business. - Collaboration
Sharing paper documents can be difficult, especially when multiple people need to access the same document later and from different, remote locations. This can lead to delays and errors because documents cannot be accessed in real time, requiring manual searches and even physical hand-offs.
Bridging the gap with FlexxStore
With FlexxStore, you can bridge the gap between analog and digital documents and get the best of both worlds.
Through a customizable digitization process, analog documents are easily brought into your Dynamics 365 Finance & SCM environment once they are no longer actively being worked on.
Because each document is associated with a unique business case in D365, it's easily accessible to everyone in your organization. Whether you're looking for a document based on a supplier, customer, business case or different types of orders, FlexxStore helps you find the right document.
By working with these digitized documents, FlexxStore enables more efficient information management processes, provides greater transparency within your value chain and fosters collaboration among teams from remote locations.
What could your business process look like with FlexxStore?
Step I: Production orders are created and printed via Dynamics 365 Finance & SCM to be handed over to your production team. At the same time, FlexxStore creates so-called "cover sheets" for all analog documents that are to be digitized later.
What is a cover sheet?
A cover sheet contains all relevant information to connect a document with a business case in Dynamics 365. This includes order information, customer or supplier information, document types, document names and much more!
Placing a cover sheet at the beginning of a document ensures that the contents are stored in the archive and connected to a specific business case in D365.
Step II: Printed production order documents, including all necessary cover sheets, are handed over to your production team.
Step III: During production, your team can freely annotate the paper documents associated with the production order. In addition, standardized forms, such as quality inspection forms, can be completed manually and stored with all other relevant documents.
Step VI: After the production order is completed, your production team collects all relevant documents and cover sheets and sorts them accordingly. The stack of paper is then placed in a document scanner and the scanned documents are to the FlexxStore Document Hub.
Step V: This is where the magic happens: The FlexxStore Document Hub automatically detects the barcode or QR code on the scanned coversheets and stores all subsequent scanned pages in your archive according to the document types and associated D365 business cases you have previously defined. Each time a new coversheet is identified, a separate document is created and stored.
Once the scanning process is complete, anyone with access can view the digitized documents and their contents in real-time through Dynamics 365 Finance & SCM. This not only enables more efficient information management, but also provides greater transparency within your value chain and improves collaboration between your teams
