#58 Spreadsheets...Emails...Data Silos. 10 signs why you should consider a case management platform

10 signs why you need a case management solution. And yeah, so they are really good 10 points. We have research for you guys and I will kick off straight away. So one sign is you are using spreadsheets to manage the really important and mission-critical work in your company. So everyone knows spreadsheets are of course very easy to use. Everyone knows it, it's installed on every workstation and it takes just a few minutes to really get going. But the big problem with spreadsheets is they just don't scale, and oftentimes they are fraught with errors. Of course, when you have lots of different versions circulating around and someone is by mistake deleting a row, so of course plenty of errors are possible there. So that can impact important decisions and information making actually in the business, and Yeah, I think that's, that's one really, really good sign why you should actually move away from spreadsheets for sort of mission-critical activity and work.

Probably a good place to start in your business if you do a lot of case management-centric type activities. Go and find those spreadsheets. They will give you a clue as to where and what type of case-centric automation you need to put in place. Another one to look out for is you are drowning in physical paper for each case. Now, paper reduction has some obvious benefits, but it can also, as you would know, most people would know, it can improve your business efficiency. The problem with paper is that information flow using paper is really slow. It becomes very stale, you know, and by the time it's sort of rich or there's a change in it, you know, it needs changing again. So it's very labor-intensive. You know, you look at creating handwritten signatures and having to export data manually and to provide some sort of summary, print things out, scan things, you know. And I think, you know, what we're saying here is that paper really hurts your processes a lot. And, you know, some people say that it's more than actually the paper cuts that paper give you, right?

Arno, it just hit me, and I thought maybe we should clarify that term case management. Slightly, because maybe some of our listeners might listen, okay, case management, you might think about sort of legal cases, that kind of stuff. But generally, when we talk about case management, it is not really just around that legal case. It could be sort of a process and some flow within the company, sort of dealing with whatever sort of I would say thing in your business. It could be a place, an event, a person, customer requests, all sorts of stuff. So that, that, that is what we sort of describe as a case here. So it's not really, really limited to that very sort of legal case management everyone might think of. And it's, it's pretty much everything what is a bit more unstructured in the business. So, so this is what you would usually put into a case management system. Yeah, so I hope that that quick detour was helpful. And yeah, just look at the next point. So when working anywhere outside of the office, you are hamstrung without internet access and forced to fall back on manual paper processes. So field working teams like service technicians, consultants, and maintenance staff had previously been restricted to manual and, yeah, the paper-based work due to connectivity issues. But with the continued development, so we all know about 5G, it's no longer necessary for those teams to carry out sort of the outdated style of working. And even if your teams are without internet access and internet service, working offline should not be an issue with all the technology we have available these days with mobile applications. So So these outdated processes are slow, inefficient, and they are not agile and very slow, of course. It's really needed in the new work environment, really.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's a good one. The next one is you often deal with what I call swivel chair syndrome. What that means is bouncing from different screens and tabs to find the information you need across your different systems. And this has become a problem that is getting worse every day. You know, all of us are guilty of having dozens of tabs and windows and applications open at once. And you know, this is compounded when you add multiple screens to your desk, for example. So there's just more, more place to open up these tabs and jumping back and forward between these various point solutions, email, spreadsheet, is not very efficient. And, you know, it can create confusion and lead to incorrect decisions on these cases that we are dealing with.

Yeah, it's a good point. Even with all those tabs and applications, it's really difficult to really find the truth of that information. And really, that brings us to our 5th sign, you spend a substantial amount of your time searching for that right piece of information.

Yeah.

And yeah, as you mentioned, with all the tabs, it's really, really difficult. So you look in your CRM, your emails, messages, other systems, legacy systems. Sometimes it's really, really difficult actually to get that information out. Sometimes you have— we came across a few in the past, you actually have to log into a separate terminal which was still running on this, you know, these green screens. Right? Yeah, so to get some, some really, really strange information from, from that. Yeah, so you need all that information to complete the task or answer maybe a specific question. And yeah, and then sometimes you find different versions of that data and you— yeah, it doesn't really make it make your life easier. So, and we all probably agree it would be awesome to do it obviously in a better way and have all that information in one place where it's very current and accurate. And yeah, it's really giving you the truth of information at any time and anywhere, really.

Yeah, yeah. And that kind of brings me on to the next point. If you find yourself um, you know, looking at your cases and there's a, there's a lack of, um, kind of a consistent visibility across them, you know. So again, from a management perspective, this can really hinder your ability to drive, you know, speed and efficiency processing these cases. And, you know, just, just getting a basic understanding of you know, what's going on can be a very big challenge if you don't have automated case management. You know, for example, you know, a simple tracking question like how many people raised a particular inquiry about a specific product really turns into a nightmare. And, you know, you have to hunt for this information, whereas if you have automated case management, you know, that, that's something very easy to achieve because you could just use a specific view, filter your cases, for example, by a case type or subtypes, and that information is available.

Yeah, very good point. Yeah, the next sign is you don't have a productive way to collaborate on details and information and resort to email, messaging, meetings, or calls. Yeah, that's actually Very typical all day, more than ever, I would say. Yeah, internal communications can indeed be really, really tricky and really fast, and ad hoc email, messaging apps, phone calls, video calls, all can leave someone out who is vital to the project. So more importantly, these methods don't really provide all the visibility to allow everyone to see how the progress is. So it would be really nice if you can actually see it in maybe one screen. So those status updates on cases, yeah, can very quickly take all the good valuable time away from people as part of the process. And yeah, and very often these things have to be repeated over and over again to other systems. So yeah, it really needs that single system ideally where everyone gets the, gets the, gets a picture of what's going on. And of course it's easy to very quickly hack a message into WhatsApp and Teams and, but no one will find that information ever again. Yeah, that, that can't be a way forward.

These days. Yeah, and another point is compliancy might be a real concern for you, and you know, you don't have reliable logs to go back to support a particular case. You know, looking back at how cases were handled and ensuring the proper steps were taken, you know, it's practically impossible without reliable, well-organized data. you know, and proper audits would require looking into lots of different places, different systems, and you can only imagine a number of compliance breaches that may have occurred because the data is so scattered. So case management, a byproduct of case management is audit logs, which will obviously provide some compliance peace of mind.

Yeah, that really remembers me of a situation in a financial institution. So they were basically requests like you would do nowadays on a normal sort of application. So every request was basically one spreadsheet and all the information and even the approvals. I think back then it was very popular to do sort of macro programming. You had buttons even in spreadsheets, so really bringing application logic into the spreadsheet. But anyway, so basically you had thousands of those cases in spreadsheets. And, and then that was fine, I guess, for the normal processing. But if something was then needed for a report, they had to basically go through all the different spreadsheets, compile lists out of that. So that was a task for, for over days. And then bringing in that case management systems and all the requests actually into that case management system was just a press of a button. There was a list of everything. You could say, give me this and this and this information within no time really. So from days to just seconds of work. So this is what a system like that can do. And no one wants to pull that information manually anyway. This is sort of work no one— yeah, no one. I think it's a pain. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I suppose from a case management perspective, all of that metrics is available. So that can all just be collated very quickly and use, use for reporting, for example, management reports or operational reports. Another point is if you feel that your data is siloed across different systems and is often outdated or inaccurate, that's also a telltale sign that you you need some digital case management in your life, you know, and sometimes I guess even when you get your data, you feel it's stale, you tend to read reports on what's happened in Q1 or data that was created in Q1 and it's a Q4 report or a report that you read in Q4, so it's really to late to make any kind of significant decisions or changes if the data is outdated or inaccurate. You know, in our modern times, there's no real time to wait on lagging datasets as, you know, as people, you know, run their businesses. You know, you need to have the data almost in real time. I mean, the good news in all of this is that modern low-code case management solutions, you know, can change all of this. You know, we mentioned these 10 points. Low-code case management provide you with all the tools you need to manage, execute, and analyze your caseworkers with lightning speed, agility, and also more importantly, in a very secure way. Loco tools support many types of cases. Um, Sascha, you mentioned earlier, uh, legal cases, but of course a case could be anything from a litigation case to a customer complaint to a support ticket. All of these things are types of cases, and at the end of the day, it just becomes matter management. Things come into your business that needs to be dealt with need to have some sort of outcome. And once that's done, you know, obviously the case is closed. You can go back on audits to view its history. While cases are still being dealt with, that's where, you know, you can have these reports to tell you how many you have in your business. And it just speeds up the way that these cases conclude. It makes it very, very efficient. To, you know, adopt digital case management.

Yeah, and I think there you mentioned the different types of cases, and indeed there are probably hundreds of those kind of cases in every organization, every department. So wherever— so we touched on this in our first sign— wherever there are spreadsheets really flying around as sort of as the thing or as part of the workflow and the process, then it's really, really good to move that away from the spreadsheet. And yeah, with the low-code, not necessarily everyone can get started with that one, but probably, yeah. So the idea is there that with low-code, people in the business which are not sort of typical developers, hardcore developers, high-code developers can actually get started with it. So, and that's the beauty of the low-code world and combining these two things, case management and low-code. Yeah, so everyone can really get going. Yeah. And yeah, yeah.

And I guess, you know, just from a technology perspective, you know, cases is all about receiving new matter into your business. There's going to be workflow orchestration which can be quickly configured using a low-code platform. There might be some forms development, which is done using a low-code platform as well. It's got forms developed or form design capabilities where you drag and drop all of the elements of your cases in. We can even go as far as to perhaps plug in some robotic process automation where, for instance, for a particular case, you might have to do a checking, a check on a third-party website, sanctions check, AML check, so the robot can be deployed to do that. So it just opens up a lot of opportunity to digitize the way you deal with cases with inside your business.

Yeah, great. Yeah, I hope this overview of the 10 signs why you might need case management solution was helpful. And yeah, it would be great if you can give us feedback on this. As always, we are here for you to help you further with this topic. And yeah, would be great if you can join us back here next time. And until then, let's automate it. Unfortunately, that's it again. With this episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. If you like this episode, please give us a 5-star rating and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time, and until then, let's automate it.