There are few things more irritating to a business owner than having employees spend time filling out forms and not being able to capture the data entered and put it to use elsewhere. A form is still a good way to capture data as it’s a process understood by a large percentage of the population (i.e. – who hasn’t filled in a form at a doctor’s office). The goal of an integrated electronic forms system is to reduce the amount of data input by preprocessing the form and capturing the entered data in a database. By performing these two functions, data entry time is saved; the gathered data is more accurate, and stored in a format that provides easy reporting. When integrated with an electronic document management system (EDMS), an electronic forms package becomes even more valuable.
An integrated EDMS and forms package can provide a company with a vast array of options for making data more accessible and more usable by other packages. For instance with CNG-Forms, the forms are built as a document template. This document template can then be connected to a table in the CNG database. Fields in the document template can be prefilled by data from the CNG-SAFE database. This minimizes the amount of data which has to be filled in by the user. This makes your data entry more efficient and minimizes data entry errors by using the same data over and over. As each form is saved, a new record is written to the database table saving the data from each field on the form to a field in the table. The form can then be put into an automatic workflow for approval.
After the data is stored in the data table attached to the form it can now be accessed through any number of other software applications replacing data entry in those applications or providing an extended reporting capability.
The key benefits to this type of solution are:
- A permanent record of a transaction (the form)
- The data in the form fields can be added to a database table
- Electronic workflow allows the form to follow either a rules-driven process or ad-hoc routing
- The data in the database table can be extracted, manipulated and/or reported on
- Simple to use
A whitepaper is available that discusses this subject in more detail:
http://www.cabinetng.com/white-papers/forms_integration.php
