What is visual document automation?

During the past couple of years, document automation and legal tech has become the talk of the town. M-Files Ment has taken a step up from the old ways of doing document automation. We like to use the term fully visual, no-code document automation for our solution. What does this mean in practice?

Let’s take a step back and go through the other possibilities of creating automated documents. You can use, for example:

• Tagging: You create a tag representing a question and a different tag for the answer and put them to the right place on the document.
• Coding: You could code the whole document as an individual piece of work. Sounds like a lot of work? It is. Basically, for most companies this would mean that they need to hire internal or external experts in getting the work done.
• Pre-produced decision trees: This is a popular solution still on the market. First, you determine the questions and answers, and then the decision tree needs to be combined to the document. The process itself contains more steps (i.e., testing) and therefore requires more time when compared to no-code, visual automation.
• Square bracketing: You must first prepare your document fully with square brackets and superscripts—a time-consuming exercise.

Most of the above-mentioned methods include different phases of time-consuming prep: You need to build the logic of the document on a different phase and test it on a second phase, both phases including a lot of clicking and checking the outcome of your work. Usually, in-house or external experts are necessary to get the automations done, which costs more in time and money.

In visual automation, everything happens in real time, reflecting each modification or automation you create. You can add, drag-and-drop, and remove automated questions as well as answers to them, all in the same view on your browser. As most likely you are familiar with the document you are automating, you can start working on the automations right away without having to execute another phase of the automation building before that. You simply upload the document to M-Files Ment and start going through the document, adding needed automations in the correct places, and seeing the outcome in the same view, all in real time.

How about revising your work after the automations are done? With one click in M-Files Ment, you can see the preview of the document, and test it just like end-users would. In other words, the document can be reviewed at all times, and it reflects changes and answers to the automated questions accordingly.

That’s what visual document automation is all about—ease of use, speed, and power.

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