Industries and Applications: iKAN Virtual Document Center

Industries Served

iKAN Software solutions and the iKAN Virtual Document Center are applicable to organizations across a wide spectrum of industries and service oriented companies. This is because the problems we solve – by eliminating the organizational bottlenecks of manually maintaining your paper and electronic files – exists for nearly all businesses. We have direct experience in the following vertical areas, but our expertise is not limited to these alone.

Accounting

Accounting firms are involved in three main areas that can benefit from the integration of paper and electronic document management:, bookkeeping services, tax preparation services and audit services. By using the iKAN Virtual Document Center with their clients, accountants can leverage the power of having customer scanned documents available across all three areas, resulting in better customer service and reduced operating costs.

The SaaS delivery model is especially beneficial in this relationship, because it facilitates the collaboration between the accounting firm and the client through the simultaneous access of customer documents. This represents a huge leap forward in being able to resolve issues via remote access methods as opposed to having to collect everything and make multiple copies, keeping multiple copies of data in sync, delay times for mailing, etc.

Some key areas of benefit include:

Improved Collaboration – Improve the communication between you and your clients, and collaborate in real time.
Improved Customer Service – Your clients will be more self sufficient by having access to their documents, freeing you up for more important tasks.
Improved Response Time – Instant access to documents means less delays, less extensions filed and more productive work.
Easier Audits – Customers who have an automated document management system can grant auditors log-in ID’s, reducing the interruption to their work.
Instead of weeks and months, you can be up and running in days – greatly reducing startup costs

Education

Schools today are under increased pressure to do more with less, at a time when regulatory and legal requirements are forcing them to maintain more detailed records on all aspects of school administration. The number of potential areas where document management can be leveraged are many, and include: human resources, student contracts, teacher files, board communications and corporate documents. The primary goal is to be able to address these and other areas without increased headcount.

Schools are using the Internet to deliver curriculum, student homework assignments, and even testing. Extending this idea to other areas of school administration through the SaaS delivery model is a natural extension and explains why the education marketplace is one of the early adopters of this delivery model. By eliminating the large up front capital expenditures and moving to a more predictable cash flow model, schools can focus on requirements in other programs, and the taxpayers save money.

Some key areas of benefit include:

Rapid Deployment – Instead of weeks and months, you can be up and running in days – greatly reducing implementation costs.
Ease of Use – Teachers and administrators have plenty of other things to do than learning complex electronic filing systems. The iKAN Virtual Document Center requires very little training time to understand and use – usually about 15 minutes.
Compliance – Using the Virtual Document Center will help you comply with record retention requirements.
Fast information access – Documents can be located quickly and securely over the web from any location.
Document Security – By moving your files off premise, you actually improve your security and have a built in disaster recovery plan.
Full Audit Trail – Track who accessed student or teacher files and when.

Financial Services

Financial Services includes companies who provide financial services, such as banks, credit unions, and financial advisors, but also the finance and accounting departments within organizations. The largest entities have long been users of document management technologies, especially document imaging, automating transaction workflows such as purchase order approvals, accounts payable invoicing, expense payables processing, and the loan application process. However, small to medium sized firms have not been able to achieve the same level of automation due to the high cost of these systems and the lack of clear ROI based on smaller levels of transactions.

The iKAN Virtual Document Center now gives these smaller, growing firms the ability to use the same techniques and processes of the enterprise companies, by bringing the cost of ownership, and hence the associated ROI into the range that makes the decision easy.

Some key areas of benefit include:

Get Control of your documents – Growing piles of paper on desks is not a sign of improving productivity, but an inefficiency that needs to be addressed.
Fast information access – Documents can be located quickly and securely over the web from any location, not just when you’re in the office.
Improved Customer Service – Being able to respond to a customer request quickly builds confidence and improves customer loyalty.
Do more with more space – Make better use of your high office rental costs by reducing or eliminating file cabinets.
Do more in less time – Stop wasting time managing paper and electronic files, looking for documents, or recreating lost ones.

Real Estate

The real estate industry is highly diverse and represents several important submarkets, including property management, property tax, commercial and residential sales and leasing, mortgage and title industries, and individual agents. All of these areas are still highly paper intensive, and involve multiple document types and instruments. It also involves different levels of specialization that require access to the documents – especially by attorneys, finance and administration, and end users, tenants, property owners, homeowners, etc. This ecosystem requires important interactions that are facilited through a SaaS based delivery model.

The iKAN Virtual Document Center is best suited for real estate based operations that have dispersed geographic locations or agents. By providing an easy to use system for allowing remote offices and agents to upload their electronic and paper documents, a central repository is created that improves the access.

Other key areas of benefit include:

Lowered mailing and handling costs – Reduce mailing and overnight delivery costs by scanning and importing documents directly to a central point.
Ease of use – The Virtual Document Center is perfect for smaller offices that don’t have on-site technical support staff to install, manage, and train on software applications.
Improved organization and security over email – Many firms rely on email to send documents back and forth. This has its drawbacks, including security and lack of version control.
Improved Customer Service – By having necessary documents available even when you are out of the office or at a different location, response times will improve, enhancing customer service.

Retail

Within the retail sector, ease of use and affordable cost are the primary drivers that promote change. In today’s competitive landscape, operating margins are critical, and applications have to deliver on real value and real ROI. The iKAN Virtual Document Center does these things by eliminating the high overhead associated with traditional packaged software, providing scalability as needed and costs that match actual usage. Our easy to use interface for remote and multi location establishments means less IT staff time is required for implementation and support. In the past, retailers found document capture prohibitive due to the large numbers of locations and the relative cost for infrastructure. While aggregate volume is high, individual locations did not produce enough volume to justify the cost – until now. Now cost savings can be achieved through rapid implementation times and lowered mail and overnight shipping costs. Since many retail establishments operate on very tight timelines, documents from storefront to home office quickly can be a critical operational improvement.

To summarize:

Low Startup Costs – Issues of large up front capital expenditures and dedicated infrastructure are reduced or eliminated with the Virtual Document Center SaaS based pay for use model.
Ease of use – The Virtual Document Center is perfect for smaller offices that don’t have on-site technical support staff to install, manage, and train on software applications.
Rapid Deployment – Long implementation cycles and the associated manpower costs are a thing of the past.
Lowered mailing and handling costs – Reduce mailing and overnight delivery costs by scanning and importing documents directly to a central point.

Transportation

Delivery receipts and proof of delivery documents is the lifeblood of any company involved with moving goods from one point to another. Without proof of delivery, payments can be delayed or sometimes not made at all. Being able to provide rapid turnaround of POD receipts can shorten the receivables collection cycle and save the company money.

Documents in question are often from prior periods – which increases the incidence of last and misfiled documents, or a lot of manual effort to research and locate it. This can be virtually eliminated by putting them on-line where they are always accessible 24 X 7.

Other key areas of benefit include:

Ease of Use – Designed for non computer users, the iKAN Virtual Document Center requires very little training.
Control Your Operating Costs – Reduce time for clerical filing, and looking for older documents.
Get Control of Your Documents – Instead of lost and misfiled (or taken out and never returned) documents, you have an easy way to electronically store and preserve them so they are always there when you need them.

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