When the term toxic is used to describe something one tends to think of toxic waste or a relationship turning toxic. Companies don’t associate the term with the documents they create on a daily basis.

Part of the definition of toxic is something that can cause harm. How would a document have this capability? You need to look at harm not as physical harm, but damage. The damage a toxic document can create comes from committing the Information Age’s cardinal sin: communicating inaccurate information. Toxic documents can cause civil and criminal liability, financial losses, spoil a company’s reputation with customers, partners and the public, lost productivity, lower profits, shrinking market share and poor product quality. And once a toxic document resides in your company, it can breed many more with the exact same symptoms.

Documents might seem like unlikely candidates to be informational toxins in this era of electronic text preparation and online editing, but in many cases it’s the ease of creating documents that turns them toxic. Ease disguises pitfalls in document creation processes that introduce one chance after another to make mistakes. Expensive mistakes.

Consider how a large document, like a contract, is prepared at most companies. An administrative assistant, manager or salesperson calls up a template, which is usually a static word processor document. They fill in basic information like customer names, addresses and contact information that exists either on their own desktop, in a CRM system or some networked database. They add contract boilerplate language from the legal department and sales boilerplate that resides on a local server. Even with electronic documents, this is a long, laborious process of searching through disparate data repositories and re-entering information. That process can draw out contract closings and reduce revenue.

Every one of those tasks can turn a document toxic. There’s inherent risk in transcribing or cutting and pasting information. An agent uses an old legal boilerplate because they missed the e-mail from the legal department about changes in regulations. They transpose two digits in a figure, changing a unit price or contract rollover date. They enter the name of an item to be insured but it wasn’t correct. And now a living toxic document has been born and is available for others to use and propagate.

Serious mistakes are often caught before they go out the door, but the pace of business and the ability to produce documents quickly encourages speed more than it does accuracy. The mistake doesn’t surface until it’s too late. Companies are almost always blindsided by the consequences. I was told by a customer’s chief operating officer that the only time they find out they’ve created the wrong document is when they get to the courtroom.

His business relied on a process like the prototypical one described above. It was based on manual templates. There was no enforcement or control over the type and quality of the documents being created. Like most of the document creation processes in effect today, his process only took advantage of a tiny sliver of computer technology’s benefits – electronic text. That leaves a lot of computerization’s benefits on the table. Integration with data sources and embedded intelligence can automate those templates so they draw updated information from authoritative sources every time an employee creates new material. The more advanced document creation solutions on the market today also enable managers to attach workflows that ensure documents have the right sign offs before they go outside. This model of centralised document creation also enables companies to give all of their documents a uniform look and feel that projects a more professional image.

Automated document creation is the cure for toxic documents. Its primary benefit is to eliminate the hazardous errors that can cause a company problems, while improving productivity and giving the company more control according to one insurance provider. Document automation saves companies from the most toxic step in the document and contract process, human error – i.e. someone typing the wrong premium amount.

Agents are also able to spend less time on low-value work like searching for the current version of a template and more on the important points of the contract, customer letter, RFP, etc. they’re drafting.

A first step to automating the creation of documents is to take stock of your document processes. Take time to poll or review documents and templates across the organisation that have been drafted and get an understanding of how much time was involved in creating each document. Look at how many documents are being sent, is any data contained in the documents available within another system (i.e. the CRM or policy admin system), are there any mistakes, how standard is the look and feel, and have there been any recent problems with documents produced.

Once this step has been taken, an organisation is ready to look at different software tools and technologies that can help manage the creation of documents and templates. Then “toxic” can go back to describing waste and relationships instead of documents.

Faine Mende is President of North American Operations at template management and document automation software company ActiveDocs (www.activedocs.com).