From 1 Year to 1 Month: Turbocharging Document Processing

Overview

The corporation is a Fortune 500 company distributing pharmaceuticals and providing health information technology, medical supplies, and care management tools. The company needed a new solution to reduce the manual work and increase speed in converting and merging documents for upload into SharePoint, while ensuring long-term file accessibility, and fully documented versioning of forms.

Challenge

The team, consisting of four members, serves as the gatekeepers for any software about to be released from a major corporation. They are responsible for product release requirements, ensuring that any software being sold meets the company's policies.

Originally, the team used spreadsheets and emails to gather product release requirements. However, leveraging knowledge of Microsoft InfoPath, a form was built to make this process more efficient. This form facilitates interaction with everyone at the company. The team receives internal policies from the executive team and determines how to collect information to ensure the different business units comply with these policies. The form has since been rebuilt in K2, and with attachments, it can range from ten pages to a thousand pages.

Based on the completed fields, work list items are triggered, allowing the team to verify everything has been done correctly. Ultimately, they have a finalized, completed form, which informs the team in Ireland that they can proceed with software distribution. Additionally, these records need to be kept for 12 years.

Protecting the Past, Stepping into the Future

Keeping digital records for a long period becomes challenging due to rapid technological changes. It was evident that the form created years ago wouldn't be viewable in the same way down the road. In 2014, Microsoft announced the discontinuation of InfoPath, necessitating the search for an alternative and ideally better solution.

Solution

The form, the SharePoint site, and all records management required a simple-to-use solution. The team had to deal with the InfoPath form and multiple attachments saved to a SharePoint library. The goal was to combine the form and all attachments into one PDF, maintain the order of attachments as seen on the form, and have the final version be PDF/A.

The PDF/A requirement had two main reasons: records retention, ensuring the form appeared as it did when approved, and accommodating yearly policy changes. The form needed to reflect its state at the time of approval, providing a unified library and single form. PDF/A ensures that a PDF looks the same decades later despite software updates. This criteria led to a search for "PDF/A conversion" solutions.

After documenting potential solutions and cross-referencing them with requirements, two tools, Muhimbi and Adlib, stood out. Muhimbi ran on the SharePoint site, slowing it down for other teams in a large company with numerous SharePoint sites. Adlib, however, operated in a separate environment, handling data, forms, and attachments independently, making it the preferred choice.

Results

The company has unique needs due to policy requirements. Adlib accommodated these needs and created specialized rules. A proof of concept with Adlib led to some adjustments, but the platform met the requirements. The form had different tracks depending on the software type, and Adlib allowed end-users to capture the necessary tabs based on the specific track.

Before Adlib, converting a small form in Adobe Acrobat Pro took about thirty minutes, and a large form could take two to three hours. Now, with Adlib, this process takes just a few minutes. Initially, the team converted about 20 forms per month, but there was a backlog of 250 forms due to new processes and training. Adlib significantly reduced the time required to catch up.

"What took me a month to do using Adlib probably would’ve taken me a year without it."
- Project Manager

With Adlib integrated, the team could focus on other responsibilities, making improvements to the form, assigning retention codes to SharePoint sites, and setting up records retention schedules. Adlib provided quick and easy archival versions of any form, maintaining accuracy and compliance with policies.

"We’ve completely done away with any confusion when it comes to cross referencing documents to policies."
- Project Manager

Adlib has been a fantastic third-party vendor, assisting with new version updates and integrations, including the switch to K2. The team worked backwards from desired results, capturing all requirements upfront, and collaborating with Adlib to find the best solution efficiently.

Ultimately, the software gatekeepers can now focus on core tasks that matter most, thanks to the streamlined and efficient process enabled by Adlib.