Top 5 Risks When Using An Email Approval Process.

Relying on an email based review and approval process of your materials introduces significant risks to your workflow, and can do serious harm to your organization.

Email is a great communication tool, but it lacks the necessary features to keep your review and approval processes running smoothly and securely. That’s what we’ll cover in this guide.

Top 5 Email Approval Process Flaws:

1. Security Issues
2. No Audit Trail
3. Difficulty Versioning
4. Inefficient Quality Assurance
5. Human Error

Security Issues.

Most email service providers include basic email security measures, such as encryption as well as spam and virus protection. Sadly, these aren’t always enough to protect you from cyberattacks. When your email account is compromised, cybercriminals get access to sensitive documents if you are sending them as attachments.

There is also the possibility that anyone on your team can send documents to the wrong person and expose sensitive data. This is a big problem for highly regulated industries, such as health care, insurance, and legal.

The key is to find software that allows your team and stakeholders to share, access, and manage your documents seamlessly and securely.

No Audit Trail.

Having a proper audit trail for your review and approval process requires recording who made what changes to your files, when they were made and who saw them afterwards. Using emails isn’t ideal since it requires more effort from editors and it is easy to lose update information when teams collaborate. When that happens, you could lose track of who accessed which document, including when users changed or added any information.

Also, most email service providers have limited storage space and file storing options. This can be very limiting when you’re dealing with a large amount of files and documents.

Using the right document process automation software allows you to view, store and track audit trails with ease. This helps your teams work quickly and efficiently, while also providing a low effort solution for providing compliance reports and audits for all review processes.

Difficulty Versioning.

You need to make new iterations of each document review to avoid confusion for the reviewers and to have an audit trail for compliance. Doing this with emails can be a long and tedious process. You need to track document changes manually, attach the new file versions to your emails each time, and send them out for review and approval. The entire process is confusing, time-consuming, and laborious. The naming systems can also break from person to person. This makes it challenging to track changes throughout multiple document and review versions. Also, documents in emails are very difficult to find. It takes time and effort to filter through conversation threads and find the attachments. 

Versioning can be simplified with a document process automation tool like Blue Relay. It lets you find and compare previous files easily through built-in integrations with version management. It’s a great tool to simplify, speed up, and improve the accuracy of your iterative document review and approval workflow process.  

Inefficient Quality Assurance.

Relying on emails for your review and approval process is risky. Stakeholders can easily overlook messages especially when they’re flooded with emails daily. When this happens, you’ll miss deadlines, face costly consequences, and miss critical documents for compliance. 

Use a reliable document process automation solution to ensure proper quality assurance. This helps you define, track, and manage all quality assurance tasks — whether editorial, review or approval — from production to delivery. You’ll have the confidence knowing the current status of each stakeholder in the process, and know they won’t miss reviewing, updating, and approving all critical documents, thus ensuring compliance and document quality.

Human Error.

Running your review and approval process via email requires a lot of manual work. This makes the whole process prone to human mistakes. You could attach the wrong documents to your emails, adding to the long back-and-forth process. You’ll need to go through message threads and replace the attachments with the right file, send it off, and wait for approval and review. It’s not practical, it’s often error-prone, and takes up too much time and effort, which you could spend on more critical tasks.

Streamline your review and approval workflows by using tools with robust process management features. A reliable document process automation software allows you to configure and apply sequences, timing, and responsibility rules. This lets you automate critical parts of your processes. It’s an excellent way to reduce the risks associated with manual review and approval processing.

Blue Relay makes your review and approval process secure and easy.

Use the right tool to create, change, review, and approve your business documents for compliance efficiently. Blue Relay can take away the complexities of your review and approval process. It also minimizes the associated risks of using emails. Learn how Blue Relay can help optimize your review and approval process by connecting with us today.

Get Started with Blue Relay to Automate your Member Onboarding Process.

Blue Relay is a Document Process Automation Tool that can help your company adjust to working remotely and remain HIPAA Compliant. Blue Relay helps with Workflow Automation, Team Collaboration, and Document Review and Approval. Get your company back on track while remaining compliant.

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