Content and document management is essential for success in the Logistics and Transportation Industries due to the complex nature of these sectors, which involve the movement and tracking of passengers, goods, services, and information across vast distances and multiple jurisdictions.
Efficient document management ensures that all necessary documentation, such as bills of lading, invoices, customs declarations, and delivery receipts, are securely stored, easily accessible, and promptly updated. This not only streamlines operations but also minimizes errors and delays, which can significantly impact the bottom line.
Furthermore, robust content and document management systems facilitate better communication and collaboration among stakeholders, including suppliers, carriers, and customers. This enables businesses to make data-driven decisions, optimize resource allocation, and adhere to industry regulations and standards.
Here are some of the challenges that affect these industries, and how FormKiQ can solve these challenges:
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Volume and Complexity of Documents:
The sheer number of documents generated in these industries, such as shipment records, invoices, and regulatory paperwork, can be overwhelming. Additionally, these documents often contain intricate details that require close attention and accurate record-keeping.
FormKiQ is built to manage any number of documents, backed by the most reliable and cost-effective cloud storage available, Amazon S3. In addition to that storage, FormKiQ provides various features to organize and classify documents, including optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent document processing (IDP), and enables easy document search and recall using a combination of full-text and tag-based search functionality.
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Regulatory Compliance:
Logistics and transportation businesses must adhere to various international, national, and regional regulations that govern the movement of goods. Ensuring that all documentation is compliant with these rules can be a daunting task, especially when they are subject to change.
FormKiQ is designed to meet the rigors of the Amazon Web Services Well-Architected Framework, with one of its major pillars being security. By relying on battle-tested AWS technologies that meet compliance through rigourous cerfications and controls such as FedRamp and NIST 800-53, and by enabling encryption in-transit and at-rest, FormKiQ reduces the risk of security issues, unauthorized access, and data breaches.
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Version Control and Traceability:
Ensuring that all team members work on the most recent version of a document is vital. Additionally, maintaining a clear audit trail of document revisions and approvals is necessary for the above-mentioned regulatory compliance.
FormKiQ includes version history powered by Amazon S3 Versions, and also enables document control procedures, such as requiring a document controller, providing legal hold functionality, and allowing for document expiry.
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Access Control, Data Security, and Privacy:
The sensitive nature of the information contained in logistics and transportation documents makes data security and privacy paramount. Companies must ensure that their content and document management systems protect against unauthorized access, data breaches, and other potential threats.
FormKiQ not only provides encryption in-transit and at-rest, it also enables granular access controls through user management, multi-site partitions, and both role- and attribute-based access control options. FormKiQ is built using the principles of least privilege and security by design.
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Legacy Systems and Integration:
Implementing a document management solution may require seamless integration with other software systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), warehouse management systems (WMS), or transportation management systems (TMS). This can be a complex and time-consuming process.
FormKiQ is designed for integration and interoperability, with its API-First design and by providing source code for its Core and, with some restrictions, its Enterprise offerings. FormKiQ's actions and workflows allow for robust control of documents and data as they move in and through FormKiQ and interact with other systems. FormKiQ also provides custom authentication with SAML and other SSO options, and can enable standardization of access controls, whether role-based or attribute-based.
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Collaboration and Communication:
Efficient document management requires collaboration and communication among various stakeholders, including suppliers, carriers, and customers. Facilitating this cooperation across different time zones, languages, and organizational structures can be challenging.
FormKiQ provides integration betweens systems and disparate file storage solutions, enabling FormKiQ to maintain storage and management of the Document of Record, or provide connectivity with an alternative primary document repository. FormKiQ also enables access to Office365, Google Drive, and other productivity and online storage tools.
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Scalability and Operational Sustainability:
As organizations grow and technology advances, document management systems must be able to scale and evolve to meet increasing demands and adapt to new trends, making it a challenge to maintain long-term effectiveness.
FormKiQ is built with scalability as a primary goal, using Amazon Web Services and its serverless and managed services to ensure the best results in scaling for both increases and decreases in usage. This scalable design not only allows the application to keep pace with higher usage, it also allows for non-prod and test environments to run with minimal required resources and creates efficiency in times of reduced usage, such as seasonal lulls.
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Training and User Adoption:
Ensuring that all staff members are adequately trained to use document management systems effectively and consistently can be a challenge, particularly in industries characterized by high employee turnover or diverse skill sets.
FormKiQ not only provides documentation and support, but we can work with your existing project documentation and support processes to ensure a consistent training and support model between your software and FormKiQ's document management functionality.
As well, FormKiQ provides a user interface as part of its web console, designed according to usability principles and in step with other thoughtful file and document management products. This interface can be customized or even cannibalized as desired, with options to copy code, fork the repository, or deployed as-is and tailored with specific configuration options.
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Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity:
Ensuring that document management systems have effective disaster recovery and business continuity plans in place is crucial to minimize downtime and protect vital information in the event of system failures, natural disasters, or cyber-attacks.
FormKiQ uses infrastructure and products from Amazon Web Services, which are known for their reliability and high availability. As well, we provide professional services to help organizations determine the appropriate disaster recovery and business continuity preparation to put in place.
For more information on disaster recovery and business continuity using Amazon Web Services, you can review the Disaster Recovery section of the AWS Well-Architected Framework Whitepaper, or contact us for a consultation.
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Cost and Resource Constraints:
Implementing, maintaining, and upgrading document management systems can be expensive, and organizations must carefully weigh the costs against the benefits to determine the most efficient and effective solutions for their specific needs.
FormKiQ uses the most cost-effective cloud storage, Amazon S3, which offers intelligent tiering functionality; this handles the largest expense most document management incurs, which is the storage costs of a large volume of documents. All other components of FormKiQ make use of services and architectures that incur cost for actual usage only, ensuring that there is no wasted capacity.
In addition, FormKiQ includes the support of cloud and software engineering experts, with additional professional services available from our team as required, ensuring that a lack of in-house expertise will not prevent your organization from building the perfect document management system for its needs.
FormKiQ was specifically created to empower organizations to increase their document management capabilities in a flexible and customizable way that matches the growth and specific focus of each organization.
Contact us to discuss how FormKiQ can reduce document management, process, and workflow agony for your organization.