Jerry,
I have a similar thought process here.
The more I look at InstaDocs, the more it seems like a great idea for storing casual documents - product manuals and warranty agreements. Where I think it falls down for the case of a full paper replacement ( paperless ) system is in the need for users to populate tags.
There also appears to be a weakness in the primary UI for searching saved documents doesn't allow for limiting the search by date created, and does not perform any OCR, or searches WITHIN the documents.
It's all about tags, and my opinion on tags seems to mirror yours - they are great until they aren't. Some aspects of InstaDocs seem to support some auto-tagging. My guess is that there will be enough extra areas that require manual tags that the process would quickly become cumbersome.
Also, InstaDocs doesn't have a "one place" to view a group of documents related to a particular order -- which in many cases includes email and fax conversations.
With Altec - which is admittedly much more costly - they can do OCR, and from the Sage consulting side, we could populate a UDF for " Job Number " ( aka Sales Order ) on forms that don't have a Job/Order field
For example, I can imagine if the goal is to look at the history of an order from start to finish that management realistically wants to click one button to view the info and not remember a series of searches that may bring up related documents.
Altec is more costly and requires more labor to set up ( on a 2019 sale, 1/2 of the selling price was Altec professional services). However, if your goal is to go 100% paperless, I also believe you need to have very little reliance on staff to do anything, such as manually applying tags to documents.
Thanks for the feedback!
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Wayne Schulz
wayne@s-consult.comSchulz Consulting
(860) 516-8990
Moodus, CT
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Original Message:
Sent: 01-20-2023 09:34
From: Jerry Norman
Subject: InstaDocs as a full paperless document system
I've *never* seen a system work that relies on users to voluntarily populate a field. This is over 25 years of consulting and using both CRM and ERP systems,
The only way this possibly works is to automatically populate required field. It can be making it a required field so that nothing can be done unless the field is populated. But then that requirement either gets in the way during "edge cases" or doesn't activate in some uses of the forms or views used in the process. It might also be done via custom coding, but even that has the same problems; it's also generally not maintainable.
Wouldn't it be better to use a data field that already goes across all the documents, like JobNo? (I'm thinking of Ops Mgt here.) If this customer is trying to build a "poor man's" JobOps/Ops Mgt, I think they're doomed to fail unless they are very small.
Altec might be complicated to setup, but is it complicated to use once properly configured? No more so than other elements of business software. It's just different.
When something is deemed "too expensive" I also step back to the Value Evaluation step. What financial benefits do they think will occur if they do this? This helps eliminate those "project dreams" that merely pet peeves by the owner or his "brilliant" child.
This is a corollary of my evaluation criteria for a "great product idea." If I can't find anybody else doing it, there are only two explanations:
1. It really is great, and I'm brilliant to think of it,
or
2. It's been tried and doesn't work.
For me, it's almost always Door #2. I like to think I'm a smart guy ... but I'm not that smart. Same with this scheme to use a product in a use case it's not designed for.
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Jerry Norman
Smartbridge Partners
(512) 653-7498
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