The Power of Groups

As a fresh faced law school graduate, one of my first tasks at the firm I joined was to incorporate a company. From what I recall, the process involved:

1. Writing people's names and addresses over and over again in a whole bunch of documents (application forms; directors' consents; meeting minutes; share certificates; notices, and numerous other templates) and crossing out sections of documents that weren't applicable.
2. Handing the documents to a secretary to type them up (I can't recall why I wasn't supposed to type them myself).
   
3. Reviewing the documents for accuracy.
4. Handing the documents back to the secretary to fix.
5. Posting the documents to the client.
   

What I remember most clearly was not understanding why the process was so slow and (in my view) so susceptible to error. I was writing the same information in at least half a dozen different documents. Surely there was a better way?

It turns out that what I was after is a function in Exari called Groups. As the name suggests, Groups enable you to set up related templates so that users only have to provide information once, with the system then populating all the documents with that information and producing them as a package. The result? A suite of consistent documents generated in a fraction of the time.

If only they'd had that when I was a grad.

Lawyers and Clients

Us versus them! This often seems to be the attitude of an organisation's legal department vis-à-vis its internal clients, and vice versa. As Ken Adams puts it:

"lawyers consider business people to be loose cannons willing to sell their first-born to close a deal, whereas business people regard lawyers to be “overhead” always eager to find obstacles so as to remind their masters why they were hired in the first place."

Lawyers vs Business People

To close a deal, the business people need a signed contract. Historically, this has required them to wait for legal to draft and/or review each agreement to ensure that it is compliant. The problems with this approach are:

1. It increases the time to produce a contract, which frustrates the business person's ability to do their job.
   
2. The lawyers get tied up doing repetitive, low value contract review because they don't trust the business people.
   

How can we get these two groups working with, rather than against, each other? How can the business people turn their deals around in real time without causing legal to fret over lack of compliance?

One option is for legal to automate their standard contract templates, and provide the business people with a pre-approved self-service contract creation system. This is the approach that Factiva has taken (PDF).

Banking on the Cost of Complexity

Having worked a lot with banks recently, we're well aware of their huge range of product offerings. (According to Accenture, your typical bank now has about 350 products.)

What may be less apparent is the staggering cost of supporting such a variety of products. A recent Banking Strategies magazine article, Uncovering the Hidden Cost of Complexity, explains:

"In the past, financial institutions handled less variety so "assembly-line" processes evolved, processes that could handle volume well, but not variety. If you put variety through a process designed for "plain vanilla," you get increased operational and quality issues, such as workarounds, re-working, cost-overruns, increased staffing levels, etc."

The impact? Poor service levels and a confusing customer experience, which in turn lead to decreased customer satisfaction and reduced profitability.

So, what to do? The solution, appropriately enough, is to create processes which can handle variety. And that's where document assembly comes in. Advanced document assembly systems are designed specifically to handle variety (see The Sweet Spot of Document Assembly).

Automating complex documents, such as finance contracts, enables banks to handle existing product changes more efficiently, and decrease time-to-market for new products. That has certainly been the experience of our customers.