Are you responsible for generating repetitive business documents at scale such as loan agreements, credit applications, service agreements, letters of consent, sales pitches, legal contracts, or onboarding materials? Then you’ll be all too familiar with the time-consuming daily challenges of creating and managing business documents in Microsoft 365. The manual effort, inconsistencies, and approval delays are just a few of the frustrations you face.
The Common Challenges of Document Creation
Manual Effort and Repetition
We know that creating documents manually is time-consuming and repetitive, especially when you’re dealing with large volumes of similar documents. This increases the risk of errors, such as typos, incorrect data entry, or inconsistent formatting.
Inconsistencies
Without using standardized templates, the documents you create can vary widely in format, style, and quality, leading to a lack of uniformity. Maintaining consistent branding across all documents is especially challenging without a centralized system.
Inefficient
Recreating similar content for different documents wastes time and resources. Managing and updating reusable content across multiple documents can also be cumbersome and error-prone.
Collaboration and Approval Issues
You may struggle with collaborating with your teams on documents, leading to multiple versions and confusion. Manual approval processes can also be slow and inefficient, causing delays in document finalization.
Compliance and Security Concerns
You’ll find that making sure that all documents meet regulatory and compliance standards is difficult without a standardized approach. And managing access and permissions manually can lead to security vulnerabilities and unauthorized access to sensitive documents.
Integration Challenges
Finally, integrating document creation processes with other business systems (e.g., CRM, ERP) can result in data silos and inefficiencies. As your organization grows, manual document creation processes may not scale effectively, leading to increased workload and resource strain.
But it doesn’t have to be this way…
Introducing SharePoint Premium Content Assembly
A new feature within Microsoft SharePoint, SharePoint Premium Content Assembly has been designed to streamline the process of creating, managing, and assembling documents from various content sources, resulting in as much as 60% in time saving.
This tool is particularly useful if you need to generate standardized documents such as reports, proposals, contracts, or any other types of formal documentation regularly. Let’s take a look at six of its key features…
6 Key Features of SharePoint Premium Content Assembly
1. Template Management
- Create and store templates for different document types.
- Customize templates to meet specific organizational needs, ensuring consistency and branding across all documents.
2. Content Reuse
- Break down documents into reusable sections or blocks, which can be easily assembled into new documents.
- Automatically pull in content from various sources like databases, other documents, or SharePoint lists.
3. Automation
- Integrate with SharePoint workflows to automate the document creation process, reducing manual effort and errors.
- Automatically merge data into templates from different data sources, ensuring that documents are up-to-date and accurate.
4. Collaboration and Approval
- Facilitate collaboration among team members in real-time or asynchronously.
- Set up approval workflows to ensure that documents are reviewed and approved by the necessary stakeholders before finalization.
5. Document Assembly
- Provide a user-friendly interface for assembling documents, making it easy for users to select templates, insert content, and finalize documents.
- Allow users to customize documents during the assembly process, tailoring them to specific needs without altering the underlying templates.
6. Security and Compliance
- Implement robust access controls to ensure that only authorized users can create, edit, or view documents.
- Ensure that documents meet regulatory and compliance requirements through standardized templates and workflows.
How SharePoint Premium Content Assembly Can Help You, Examples by Job Role
Designed to address the specific issues of document creation, SharePoint Premium Content Assembly will automate and standardize the whole document process for you, saving you a significant amount of time, making you more productive and efficient.
Let’s take a look at scenario job roles and how much time we expect you to save…
Legal Professionals
Automate the creation of contracts and legal documents, ensuring compliance and reducing time spent on manual tasks. By developing reusable templates for common legal documents, you can ensure consistency and reduce drafting time. Automating the review process with approval workflows will speed up approvals and reduces delays.
Projected Time Savings: Expect to reduce document drafting time by up to 50%, saving approximately 10-20 hours per week.
Sales Teams
Quickly generate proposals and quotes tailored to each client, enhancing the sales process. Integrating SharePoint Premium with your CRM allows you to pull client data into a proposal template automatically, saving time on data entry. Standardize proposal templates and use version control to manage document revisions easily.
Projected Time Savings: Expect to cut down proposal creation time by up to 40%, saving around 5-10 hours per week.
HR Specialists
Standardize employee onboarding documents, performance reviews, and other HR-related paperwork. Develop comprehensive onboarding kits to reduce repetitive tasks. Automated notifications for policy updates ensure all employees have the latest versions, and performance review templates help maintain consistency.
Projected Time Savings: By automating onboarding and updates, expect to reduce manual effort by up to 60%, saving 8-15 hours per week.
Project Managers
Streamline the creation of project reports by using standardized templates and dynamic content insertion, ensuring documents are always up-to-date and accurate. Use real-time collaboration features to enable seamless contributions by your team.
Projected Time Savings: Simplifying reporting and documentation, expect to save up to 30%, or around 5-10 hours per week.
How Microsoft uses SharePoint Premium Content Assembly
Microsoft has been using SharePoint Premium Content Assembly to automate the creation and publishing of over 30,000 contract letters generated for three of its partner programs.
It has reportedly saved 400 hours per year on letter template refresh activities and change management.
In addition, saving 6,000 hours in one year on its complex manual letter creation process, giving it greater business agility with a faster time to market >30%.
At a glance benefits of SharePoint Premium Content Assembly
- Streamlines document creation processes, saving time and reducing manual errors.
- Ensures all documents adhere to organizational standards and branding guidelines.
- Easily scales document creation processes as organizational needs grow.
- Improves collaboration and communication among team members during document creation and review.
- Integrates with other Microsoft 365 tools, such as Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and OneDrive, fitting into your existing workflows.
Buying the SharePoint Premium License
Want to enjoy these time savings and more efficient ways of working? Your IT team will have to upgrade its Microsoft 365 license.
We suggest that to justify the cost, you prepare to demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) to your IT team by doing a simple cost-benefit analysis.
You’ll need to estimate time savings by calculating the hours you expect to save per week by using SharePoint Premium Content Assembly. Then, convert these hours into monetary value based on the average hourly wages of your team.
Finally, present this value against the cost of the SharePoint Premium Content Assembly license to highlight the efficiency and productivity gains for your team and the organization.
Top tip: SharePoint Premium Content Assembly is a pay-as-you-go model. It works out at 15 cents a document.
Adoption Tips for SharePoint Premium Content Assembly
As with introducing any new technology, it will require careful planning and you’ll need a user adoption program. From our experience, clients that follow these steps have the greatest success.
- Clearly communicate the benefits of SharePoint Premium Content Assembly to your team, emphasizing time savings and improved efficiency.
- Identify and engage early adopters in your organization who can champion the new system.
- Offer hands-on training sessions to help users familiarize themselves with the platform. Develop detailed user guides and documentation to assist with navigation.
- Regularly gather feedback from users to address issues and continuously improve the system. Set up a support system to help users troubleshoot any problems they encounter.
Checklist for Implementing SharePoint Premium Content Assembly
- Define your document creation and management needs and communicate these to IT.
- Secure the license by demonstrating the ROI to your IT team.
- Collaborate with IT to develop standardized templates and reusable content blocks.
- Define and document workflows for document creation, review, and approval.
- Introduce a user adoption and training program.
Implementing SharePoint Premium Content Assembly can transform your document creation and management processes. By addressing common pain points and offering a suite of automation, standardization, and collaboration tools, this solution will empower you to work smarter.
For more information about how to activate SharePoint Premium Content Assembly and build your first template, head to our CEO Pat’s blog on this very topic.
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Ready to work smarter? Contact Cloudwell for a SharePoint Premium Content Assembly demo and see for yourself how it can revolutionize your document creation process!