One of the more frustrating aspects of document control involves the manual nature of the work. In our recent Supplier vs EPC survey, we discovered that the single most important factor to EPC respondents is accuracy and formatting of the data they receive. One aspect of document control that often gets overlooked is metadata.
In this context, metadata refers to tag lists, document codes, and document numbers related to the documentation.
The survey results identified that loading supplier documents into the EPC data management tool was the biggest time-waster for EPCs. This may result from two issues:
- The quality of supplier metadata.
- The way in which EPCs review the supplier metadata.
With suppliers accepting the burden to supply document metadata, there is a clear opportunity for IT services to automate the onboarding process. This could be accomplished by implementation of an intermediate portal with sufficient intelligence to qualify data at the point of submittal. Suppliers who are providing good data will reap the reward of minimal rework, while less capable suppliers will be faced with immediate feedback.
If you enable your suppliers to embed metadata (as XML) directly into your PDF documents, this provides additional value to you and your customer on turnover. Effectively the metadata travels within the document.
DocBoss systematically creates document metadata including document specific tag lists and adds cover sheets to each outgoing document if required, including all relevant metadata. By utilizing metadata in whatever format is available, you can save time and effort and produce better documentation the first time.