An A-Z Glossary of Formpipe

If you’re working with us, either as a customer or a partner, there are quite a few terms and acronyms you’re likely to hear. While some might be obvious, others aren’t always as recognisable.

To prevent the scratching of heads, we’ve put together a handy glossary covering key terms you might come across while working with Formpipe. From output management to optical character recognition, this glossary will help you better understand us and our services.

Audit trail

An audit trail provides businesses with a record of events, changes, amends and deletions within their files or systems. They detail when an action took place, by whom, and provide more information on the activity.

Audit trails also help organisations to track and monitor all file accesses and modifications effectively, and can even be automated to flag an alert when a change occurs. Audit trails are also becoming increasingly important from a regulatory perspective - read more on this here.

Formpipe’s Autoform DM features a customisable audit trail, so you can track activities relevant to your business while remaining compliant.

Customer Communications Management

In basic terms, Customer Communications Management (CCM) describes the way a business communicates, interacts, and engages with its customers. Over recent years, the digital landscape has transformed CCM.

Formpipe can enhance your customer communications management by simplifying the way you share information with your clients and stakeholders. Learn more here.

Digitisation

Digitisation describes the process of converting physical or legacy systems for digital ones and modernising traditional processes.

This could include changing paper-based filing systems for digital storage systems, e.g. a computer server or cloud-based storage, creating quicker and easier search and retrieval.

Formpipe enables banking and enterprise customers to embrace digital transformation and allows all users (even those with limited technical knowledge) to design, distribute, access, search and retrieve digital files with ease.

Document Composition

Document composition is the process of creating, organising and formatting documents - ensuring they’re clear, understandable and visually appealing.

This includes designing the layout of the document, personalising it with corporate branding and logos, gathering the necessary text, and converting it to the right format, such as PDF or HTML.

Formpipe can help you with document composition by enabling you to easily design and develop invoices, statements, letters, labels and more. Lasernet's easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface allows you to add data (fields, images) from the Dynamics DB, build wizard-driven reporting, and create document distribution.

Document management

While document management might seem straightforward, there’s much more to it than simply putting a document in the correct folder. Effective document management should handle documents (electronic and physical) throughout their entire lifecycle, from creation to storage to archiving.

A document management system should make it simple for users to search for and retrieve documents when needed - without having to trawl multiple systems to find the information they need.

Autoform DM streamlines document management and enables users to upload, sort, store and find documents with ease.

Document retention

Document retention refers to how a business stores and retains documents over a specific time period - ensuring this process complies with regulatory requirements.

As businesses gather more and more documents (including sensitive documents and data), rules and regulations are tightening around how these documents should be stored and how long for.

Formpipe’s Autoform DM automates the document retention process to ensure your documents are stored securely for the requested time period while complying with regulatory standards or frameworks like ISO 27001.

Enterprise Content Management

Enterprise Content Management, aka ‘ECM’, is an umbrella term that describes the technologies or strategies that enable organisations to collect, store and preserve information related to business processes or employees.

This includes records management, workflow automation, content sharing, and governance/compliance management.

Formpipe are experts in the field of output & document management, which forms part of the ECM landscape.

ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance)

ESG is a business framework that stands for Environmental, Social and Governance. It acts as a set of criteria for businesses to measure and improve their ethical practices and sustainability processes.

Today, businesses, customers and investors alike are increasingly concerned by a company’s impact on the world around them. This concern also includes a company’s environmental practices, their impact on society and employees, as well as their corporate governance practices.

You can see more on ESG and how Formpipe is driving sustainable and ethical business processes here.

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)

ERP is an acronym for Enterprise Resource Planning. ERP is  software that allows businesses to run and manage multiple core business processes on one unified platform.

ERP can help organisations automate and streamline daily activities such as accounting, supply chain operations, and customer relationship management (CRM).

Formpipe works with a wide range of ERP solutions, including MS Dynamics 365, SAP, Oracle, and more.

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)

GDPR or ‘General Data Protection Regulation’ is a set of data protection rules and principles that apply to organisations that operate in the EU and European Economic Area (EEA).

GDPR is one of the strongest sets of data privacy rules in the world and it helps to safeguard the privacy rights and personal data of individuals across the specified European areas.

To become GDPR compliant, organisations must follow a series of steps and measures relating to data protection and can apply for a certificate.

With Formpipe, you don’t need to worry about GDPR compliance as we ensure all document management processes, such as filing data and archiving emails adhere to GDPR requirements - see more here.

Input Management

Input management refers to capturing, processing and validating information within a business.

The capture stage describes the way an organisation receives files (electronic or physical) or extracts data (e.g. from emails). The processing stage covers how data is extracted and converted into a compatible format for the business’s systems. Once processed, the data can then be validated and error-checked to ensure the information is accurate before being stored.

While input management can be done manually, it is time-consuming, expensive, error-prone, and often needs to be replicated across multiple domains. Automation, therefore, can rectify these challenges and make input management much smoother.

Formpipe’s document management tool, Lasernet, simplifies the input management process and can help you receive, validate and upload documents faster and more efficiently.

As soon as a document arrives in a monitored folder, Lasernet automatically extracts the data and imports it into your ERP solution without human intervention. Plus, all files can be processed whether handwritten (using OCR technology) or digital, ensuring all of your information is up-to-date and accurate.

On-premise

Unlike Software as a Service (SaaS), on-premise software is hosted, managed and maintained on-site by the organisation (instead of a remote location by a service provider).

On-premise solutions could include Microsoft Office or Adobe products, where software has to be installed and upgraded by the user. While on-premise solutions can be more expensive and require more maintenance, they give you full control over the software platform.

Whilst Formpipe is a SaaS and cloud-first company, all of our products are available on-premise.

Optical Character Recognition

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology enables users to convert scanned documents into text. OCR can be used on  documents that feature handwritten text, printed text, images and more.

OCR can be beneficial particularly when you need to quickly and efficiently extract data from a document without going through a time-consuming manual process.

Formpipe’s Lasernet product uses OCR to enable businesses to capture, extract and process data from documents of all file types.

Output management

The primary goal of output management is to ensure that information reaches the right place at the right time in the correct format. The process helps to create, arrange, distribute and store documents and all other forms of output within an organisation.

Output management controls how systems and applications receive output devices such as digital archives and printers. .

As an input and output management tool, Formpipe’s Lasernet solution for Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides users with complete control over the design, development, and storage of documents and reports. It consolidates output from different sources into a single stream and provides simplicity in transforming and distributing them.

Personally Identifiable Information

Personally Identifiable Information (PII), refers to any information that can be used to identify an individual. Examples of PII include a person’s full name, address, date of birth, employment history, and more.

Privacy laws like GDPR and The Privacy Act help to prevent PII from being available in the public domain or revealed to third parties.

Personal Sensitive Information

As a subset of Personally Identifiable Information, PSI (Personal Sensitive Information) is information that is particularly sensitive and requires extra protection due to the potential impact. Examples of PSI include sexual orientation, religious beliefs, financial information, medical history, and more.

Organisations should be careful to accurately distinguish between PII and PSI as the latter is subject to specific legal requirements and safeguards, including consent for its collection.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software delivery model which is offered on a subscription basis by service providers who host and maintain software on behalf of the end-user.

SaaS is known for the scalability, affordability and flexibility it offers to businesses, eliminating the need for on-site infrastructure changes or manual installation/upgrades.

Lasernet and Autoform DM are both available to Formpipe customers as a SaaS offering through Formpipe Cloud - taking care of everything for you, from software hosting to security and compliance.

System Integrator

A System Integrator, also known as an SI, is a company or individual that brings together different software, tools and technologies into one centralised location as a single IT solution.

They use specialist knowledge and expertise to simplify an organisation’s technology environment and streamline business processes.

Formpipe acts as an SI by consolidating disparate input and output management processes into one convenient solution. We also work with a wide range of well-recognised SI's (including DXC, Deloitte and Capgemini) on major national and international projects.

Anything we’ve missed? Get in touch with us if you have any additional questions or queries via the form below or you can read more about Formpipe here.