Seamless Document Management With Infor IDM

In this four-part blog series, we discuss how businesses can accelerate innovation and create competitive advantage by implementing Infor OS and related solutions.

Businesses often struggle to keep track and manage high volumes of physical and digital documents created within an ERP system. Most businesses manage these documents manually, separately from the ERP process and business transactions. With such a disjointed process, documents get saved in different systems and users have to switch between applications or spend time manually searching for documents. Other business challenges associated with managing a high influx of documents include:

• Identifying the correct documents
• Ensuring compliance and audit
• The complexity of integrating and collaborating on documents across applications
• Central access and document security

This blog discusses how businesses can speed up document-centric processes by leveraging their existing ERP system with IDM.

Infor Document Management (IDM) is a document management solution that is built into the Infor OS and is the common document management platform for all Infor products. IDM offers a secure repository to store and access documents quickly. It integrates with multiple front ends including H5 and Ming.le Homepages, enabling direct links with documents and the business processes in Infor M3, CloudSuites as well as other applications, from creation to storage to distribution, throughout the business.

Here are some of the core concepts of the IDM solution on the Infor OS platform:

Manually capturing corporate documents is not an easy task, especially the related financial documents. For example, many companies still collect, validate, approve, and pay supplier invoices manually. The Accounts Payable department consumes valuable resources to carry out these tasks, yet encounters data entry errors, processing delays, and finds it difficult to track paperwork. With the IDM Capture, an add-on by Ephesoft, you can automatically capture vendor invoices and other related documents.

Manually or automatically capture any type of document and their data from any source and import them into IDM.

• Manually or automatically capture any type of document and their data from any source and import them into IDM.
• IDM provides both optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent character recognition (ICR) capabilities that enable converting machine-printed and hand-printed text into digital formats.
• Extract metadata from documents using business rules.
• Receive error alerts and exceptions so that you can manually review the documents and avoid bad data coming into the system.

In manufacturing, users produce a countless number of documents from purchasing material to shipping an order to a customer. You deal with many suppliers and customers who produce and share documents in different formats and mediums. To keep operations running smoothly, these documents need to be stored effectively so that the correct users can retrieve them quickly from any location.

IDM offers these features for efficient document storage and retrieval:

• There is no limitation to the document types that can be saved in IDM. This enables users to save emails, vendor documents, invoices, receipts, employee records, images, and videos.
• IDM supports attribute management (metadata), which allows each document stored within the data repository to be tagged with relevant information. This information can then be used for document identification.
• In-context access to the central repository from various Infor apps, while ensuring secure access and managing document permissions
• Versioning and check-out/check-in capabilities