Blog - Page 13 of 13

Blog

Read up on some of our recent blogs. Have a question or comment? We would love to hear from you.

August 25, 2020

Why Haven’t We Converted Away from Paper to Digital Yet?

If you’re sitting in your office—or home office—take a quick moment to look around you. There are probably sheets—if not heaps—of paper cluttered on your desk, stacked in boxes, or filed away in storage. On any given day this is probably what your typical office looks like and if you are the typical office worker you will probably utilize approximately 10,000 sheets of paper per year.

However, that is just one worker. Imagine the volume of paper in your entire office, year after year, employee after employee, and the impact that this potentially has had on our carbon footprint. Perhaps we never really wanted to know just how many trees it took to produce all that paper, and that is probably because you’d be shocked at the size of a forest that is actually in your office.

In today’s world, much of our daily lives have transformed towards digital and away from paper, but we should ask ourselves if we are getting there fast enough. Perhaps it may take a deeper understanding of the papermaking process in finally taking action to convert from paper to digital.

The process of converting trees to paper begins with harvesting trees turned into big boards that are used for building and construction with the pulp left over from harvesting becoming the foundation for creating paper. This pulp then goes through an intensive process that includes being mixed with water, screened, dried, and pressed before finally being shaped and cut to desired sizes.

This process, though, is never simple and requires a heavy demand in additional resources to produce just a single sheet of paper. To shine a light on this process, it takes 32 million BTUs and 293,868 liters of water to produce just 1 ton of paper (200,000 sheets).

Now take into consideration that the average worker goes through approximately 10,000 sheets of paper per year. One tree alone can produce 8,333 sheets of paper—I know, math, but bear with me. If the average company employs a roster of 100 employees, this can potentially equate to 1,000,000 sheets of paper per year.

To put this into perspective that’s 120 trees, one-acre worth of forest, or the size of a regulation football field. And that is just for one average-sized office.

There are nearly 2 million employer businesses in Canada. If each business hires on average 100 people, each averaging 10,000 sheets of paper, then we as Canadians collectively would be using 1.6 billion sheets of paper or 192 million trees—annually.

In the past two decades, an average of 2.3 million square kilometers of forest were lost globally, with only 800,000 square kilometers of forest being gained. British Columbia, known for its Rocky Mountains and beautiful, boundaries of trees, is visibly becoming depleted and most of Vancouver Island has been converted to young tree farms. This trend, however, has spread eastward as Saskatchewan and Quebec are following suit. The negative impacts as a result have already plagued our planet for future generations as they have consequentially affected natural habitats along with pollution.

Pollution is inevitable and unavoidable with the production of paper. The paper industry accounts for approximately 20% of total air pollution. In addition, land and water pollution, including contamination, have the ability to destroy entire habitats and ecosystems altogether. In Canada alone, the paper industry accounts for 5% of the total waste we see in waterways. With about 25% of water used to produce paper leads to contamination, we can see that to produce just 1 ton of paper translates to 75,708 liters of contamination.

To go through on average of 120 trees per year by your average-sized office you can imagine now not just how big of a forest it took to transform it all into paper but as well as the magnitude of the environmental impacts to do so.

We have long relied and depended on paper for documents, records, and contracts, yet the crucial information stored here isn’t forever—so why haven’t we still gone digital?

With modern technology we have the capability to store information practically forever—yes, this is obviously something Consentia specializes in as well but that’s not the point. Once our precious resources are uprooted and transformed, they cannot be transformed back into trees. We can, however, transform the information on paper into digital—that will essentially be forever—and simultaneously start evolving away from paper altogether.

We cannot reverse the effects that we have already caused but we can allow our planet to heal and adequately provide an opportunity for sustainability. Now wouldn’t that be an “in-tree-guing” vision moving forward—yes, pun intended.

May 22, 2020

Consentia Inc. Announces Jonathan Chia as President and Partner

Edmonton, Alberta, May 22, 2020—Consentia Inc., a leading provider of professional services and digital transformation announces today that Jonathan Chia has been named President and Partner. Jonathan, who has been a Senior Executive and Consultant at Consentia for the last six months will now assume the new role and investment in the company.

Jonathan is a seasoned business leader with a proven record of delivering results for stakeholders. Having served as CEO and CFO of publicly traded and privately owned entities, he brings the right mix of leadership to ensure we continue to deliver value to Consentia and our clients.

“This is an exciting time for Consentia where we see decades of experience and momentum in North America and great opportunity for future growth,” says CEO Nizar Somji. “Jonathan will provide the right leadership. His expertise in partnerships, technology, and global strategy combined with his strong relationship with our people, make him ideally suited to accelerate our business process automation growth model. I am delighted to be partners again with Jonathan as we take Consentia to the next level.”

“I look forward to helping to expand our capabilities and offerings at Consentia,” said Jonathan. “Over my last few months, I have seen Consentia’s strong business model and a talented team that uniquely positions it in North America. As the industry evolves through AI-machine-learning, automation, and technology migrations, Consentia is able to provide cost effective and secure solutions on Canadian soil to help clients effectively manage their data and automate processes in a way that meets and exceeds shareholder expectations.”

Consentia is growing beyond scanning solutions and professional services, a natural progression from their longstanding success in the field. “Our professional services teams are experts,” says Alim Somji, Executive VicePresident, “ECM veterans, implementing document protocols, migrating physical and digital data to the cloud environment, and delivering content and quality. Businesses today need to proactively streamline processes at a lower cost to be competitive, while safeguarding information,” he continues, “we now automate business functions and data in Canada—decreasing costs, and assuring intellectual intelligence stays intact locally, with no data transfer off-shore.

Consentia Inc. is one of the top professional services and digital transformation companies in Alberta, and an experienced data management company. We deliver the optimal blend of transformational services, people, and technology to help clients retool their organization in a connected model, move quicker, and pursue sustainable growth. Our dedicated team focuses on automation, data organization, and security on Canadian soil.

We have been in business for over 50 years, and branded as Consentia in 2015, a merge between Accurate Data and CriticalControl Solutions – the largest players in data management in Western Canada. With over 5000 satisfied clients, our reputation for quality, due diligence, security, and efficiency places Consentia amongst the upper echelon in the dynamic landscape of information management.

consentia.com

info@consentia.com

February 10, 2020

Business Process Automation: Accounting Does Not Have To Be a Headache Anymore

Accounting is a tedious but essential part of any organization. Accounts Receivable (A/R) is the action that puts money into the pockets of your business, with Accounts Payable (A/P) being the driving force to help your business grow and develop (which ultimately leads to more revenue entering the business’s wallet). A/P and A/R are the lifeblood of an organization, and immense importance should be given on ensuring these practices are performed efficiently and effectively.

Think about the next 5 years – is business growth towards the top of your list? Probably! Well the only way to successfully grow in such a competitive environment is to have all hands on deck and have the focus of your key members solely on growth-generating activities. These activities could take the form of networking, collaboration, analyzing your current market, looking into tapping new markets, research and development, hiring, and even getting leaner.

Every business has their niche, their one strong suit. This one service forms the foundation of your business and is your optimal revenue generating activity. The best use of your organization’s time is to focus on this type of activity and leaving those tasks not in the sphere of your expertise to partners. Freson Brothers, whom we will touch on later, noticed the need to have their focus surrounding revenue generating activity and to have Business Process Outsourcing Partners use their expertise in areas of invoice automation. As such, Freson Brothers partnered with Consentia to provide Accounts Payable Solutions. This partnership has been incredibly successful for both parties for years.

Consentia is an industry leader in digital transformation. Our competency in document scanning and accounting is unmatched. However, just because we offer a great service does not mean that attention should not be paid towards business necessities. Human resources, proper training, corporate culture, all these are necessities than cannot be sacrificed for revenue. There needs to be a split focus between necessities and revenue generating activity for a business to grow. Think of it like gardening… revenue generating activities are the seeds and business necessities is the water!

Now to speak about our BPO Partner, Freson Brothers! Established in 1955, Freson Brothers has a long history of serving the Alberta market and operate 16 (soon to be 17) locations throughout the province. Freson Brothers was able to successfully grow their business organically, a feat that is rare in the grocery industry where a sharp emphasis to efficiency is required to maintain or improve profit margins. However, with this immense success comes the natural expansion of accounts payable volumes and the increased overhead costs of dealing with the increased paperwork and number of transactions.

Freson Brothers wanted a solution that met the following requirements:

Must be easy to use at stores
Would eliminate courier/associated costs
Would allow for faster processing times
Could be implemented/tested at a few stores before being rolled out
Must be easily scalable to accommodate adding more stores as Freson Brothers grows
Integrates easily with financial system
Built in ability to handle new circumstances or challenging invoices with ease
Reduced cost for processing invoices

After implementing Consentia’s solution, Freson brothers were able to successfully achieve the goals listed above. The implemented solution was immensely easy for Freson staff to use, and allowed for cost saving benefits through staff redeployment and elimination of courier costs. Through partnering with Consentia, Freson Brothers was able to successfully scale upwards by adding more locations and reducing the time it takes to process invoices once received. Lastly, Freson Brothers greatly favoured the web portal established as it provided them with a quick and easy way to deal with any exceptions that arose through the course of business.

February 4, 2020

Enterprise Content Management in 2023

Which device are you reading this article on? Your desktop? Possibly your mobile device? Below the piece of glass with which you are reading these words is the possibility to access endless information. Knowledge on any topic imaginable can reach your device in the blink of an eye. Ease of access to documents, content, and data can now streamline business processes and automate workflow. However, just because we have all this information does not mean that each piece is as valuable as the next. As such, the collected material must be adequately organized to be optimally utilized. Involved in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) are the tools and procedures to collect and organize the aforementioned data, so as to be of value to the reader (whether the reader is a senior manager, client, etc).

There are a number of components within ECM which aid in achieving the goals listed above. The processes involved include capturing, managing, storing, preserving, and delivering information.

– Capturing information is accomplished through data transformation whereby physical documentation is converted to an electronic form, this being merged with your current catalogue of electronic information to deliver an inventory ready to be managed. An electronic catalogue would include pulled metadata which describes that piece of data.

– The Managing aspect includes the networking of data, records, and web content management to utilize information. Included with the above means are document management and business process management. The 5 components can either be working together, or separately.

– Storing data places an emphasis on the interim, with the information that is either not required or frequently changing backed up in the short term to allow for editing, if necessary.

– The Preserve component backs up the information that is opposite of what was listed in the last point, that is the infrequently changing and required data being backed up via Records Management Systems.

– Finally, Delivering the information provides the requested information to the user requesting it.

Documentum is an example of Records Management that is found in all stages of ECM. As Michael Trafton of BlueFishGroup states “Documentum is like a hard drive on steroids” due to its incredible practical applications for medium and large sized enterprises. There is still the ability to store your crucial files, however a difference compared to a hard drive stems from the ability to access these files. This ease of access does not take away from the notion of security, with Documentum providing the ability for certain parties to view (or not view) sensitive information, and allowing the capability to edit information through authorization.

Along with excellent security, there are a number of worthwhile benefits that an organization can reap through implementation of ECM Solutions:

– A log of different versions pertaining to a file are present, with the competence to access older versions. Documentum would keep track of every version of a document where a change has been made. The name of the file would still remain the same, however data pertaining to the changes made and who made the changes can be requested.

– Documentum acts as Google for your files, providing a search engine to look up words, phrases, clients, or document numbers associated to a file. These characteristics are found through meta-data established during creation and indexing of a document.

– Documentum also allows for documents to be sent to different parties for approval. Whether this be a fellow colleague looking over a draft of your proposal or your Accountant altering an invoice, a workflow process is set up to ensure that necessary parties have the capacity to view, edit, and approve essential information.

– Via your linked email, you can receive a direct correspondence notifying you if a file has been sent to you for approval or if any changes have been made to a document. This prevents the user from having to regularly check on the status of an amendment, or diminishing the wait time between the assignment of a file and its subsequent approval.

M-Files (MyFiles) is such a platform with the aforementioned benefits. Consentia has partnered with M-Files to provide a secure and fully compliant intelligent information management platform for our clients. Our team is well versed with many ECM Solutions, including Documentum, OpenText, and Sharepoint. Through this partnership we are able to equip our clients with the very best in records management and service, setting clients up to move forward in the digital age. Consentia can provide the following services: System Migrations Preconfigured & Custom Solutions ECM Integration Records Management Workflows Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Retention Policy Services Process Mapping & Improvement

November 30, 2019

Data Security’s Relationship Between The Enterprise And the User

The issue of data security continues to be an ever-present threat. Credit card giant Capital One, recently replaced its cybersecurity chief as it assesses the aftermath from its July data breach, which saw a hacker take millions of credit card application data between 2005 and 2019 from customers applying for credit cards. The data leaked also included names, addresses, postal addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth and self-reported income, as well as credit scores and credit limits.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, data security problems are getting worse and there remains the question of how seriously both businesses and consumers take this threat. In a study performed by MasterCard, 90% of respondents noted data privacy as an important issue to them. This is followed by two-thirds of respondents believing companies are not acting in the best interests of consumers to enhance data security. Nonetheless, the blame is not solely on the heads of the corporation. Even though, according to Shred-It, around 33% of individuals have been a victim of cybersecurity threats (via information fraud, or identity theft), 28% of those who have fallen victim say they change their passwords or pins “only sometimes” after a company suffers a breach, and 9% don’t update their credentials at all.

These facts paint the perfect picture that the path towards true data security is a two-way street. Utilizers of IOT (Internet of Things) need to be aware that threats targeting one’s security is constant, and that precautions (whether this be changing passwords and ensuring internet devices are equipped with malware and ransomware protection) need to be taken to protect one’s sensitive information. With that being said, enterprises need to establish both technological and personnel frameworks to keep this delicate intelligence secure. This takes the form of the aforementioned technological aids, but also training those within the enterprise (specifically those in HR) on appropriate procedures and practices. Not only should all employees be well-versed in these practices, but continuous revisions and updates should be implemented. This is in response to a GetApp survey depicting that 41% of employers do not train all their HR personnel in protecting private data, and just 19% revise their policy quarterly.

Whether your business is small or large and whether your services are varied or niche, every business needs to implement additions to their processes to remain secure in their actions, which in turn protects your clients. This can be accomplished by:

Securing your sensitive information via encryption
Preparing for potential threats by instilling, within your employees, correct protocols
Scanning and appropriate storage of information, followed by disposal of physical copies
Limit the ability to access certain information, and disallow potentially dangerous websites

Consentia is amongst the 19% of employers who revise security policies, as we hold mandatory security workshops for every staff member every 3 months. Workshops are a great way to get your staff engaged in the education of data security practices, as it presents an interactive environment allowing staff members to be more receptive on methods to combat this issue. Consentia is committed to security, continuously making additions and amendments to our processes to keep up to date with the threat of data security. All IOT work done is monitored by our Professional Services staff, with all USB ports locked and internet within our Service Bureau floor only permitted on a per case basis. All Consentia staff members undergo criminal background checks before starting, and are observed when reading and signing of any new versions of our security manuals. Ensuring your business implements these security safeguards allows your clients to feel confident their information is in the right hands. Applying such security measures will ensure the walls of your business (the metaphorical data walls) remain protected from breach, allowing you to take on more business and increase client confidence.

Cybersecurity threats can severely impact a business. Unfortunately, such threats can hurt your business. IT departments are faced with a multitude of ever-changing threats that directly impacts business processes. Threats in earlier years took the form of information theft and vandalism. On top of this are emerging issues such as espionage, disinformation, market manipulation and disruption of infrastructure. Consentia views client partnerships as relationships. As such, we take every effort to ensure our relationships remain strong and secure. Consentia takes data security and privacy immensely seriously, with a hyper focus on these issues throughout all facets of our business, and that of our clients.

October 22, 2019

The Intelligence of Artificial Intelligence

Let’s face it, we are in the age of technology. Maybe not quite floating cars or self-tying shoes, but our world has changed significantly from even 10 years ago. Though we do not have robots amongst us just yet, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is beginning to shape various aspects of our lives. These aspects spread from the devices in our homes to the work processes in our offices. AI has made the performance of tasks quicker and easier, whilst allowing for completion of even more difficult tasks. With AI’s ability for greater responsibility, one area of wonderment is the interpretation and analysis of data. We are slowly entering the age of AI’s understanding behind the meaning of data, providing us with interpretations and accompanying solutions that we may have never noticed.

Traditional data analysis takes the form of a computer sifting through data sets which contain answers to discrete questions. These responses aid in answering questions related to:

The frequency of “positive” words compared to “negative” words
The presence of a particular phrase
A selection made from five options

Answers to these basic questions can be sought after by basic computing actions. However, we are curious beings and like to understand why an event happened or how a result should be interpreted. Responding to these queries involves an added element of human logical interaction so as to notify the computer on the linearity of the interpretation. With this being said, AI’s ability to perform data analysis needs to be in balance with both the technological and the human; with the technology side answering the discrete questions and comparing these results to a benchmark created by human reasoning. The discrepancy between the human and the technological interpretation demonstrates the disconnect between validity and reporting. Your basic computer does not have the ability to understand the nuance and interpretation of a phrase. Where logical reasoning illustrates meaning and understanding (the validity side of the coin), computers report answers derived from data sets provided.

Data analytics in the era of AI will hopefully merge computing abilities with human understanding. Currently, the problems faced with the merging of these two entities takes the form of the continued access to the data set required to accurately provide both a report and interpretation of information. However, with this problem follows strides in creating a solution, two in fact. The first is Natural Language Processing, which allows for easier use of internet searching by allowing parties to speak to their device in a language deemed to be comfortable, thus affording these parties with the utmost accuracy for their inquiries. The second solution are Bots, which ask proactive questions to extract data and create a foundation to develop insights that are comparable to those created via human reasoning.

At Consentia, we take pride in our unique ability to both create and analyze data sets. Specifically, our Survey Department of Business Process Outsourcing utilizes both Consentia’s Managed and Professional Services to collect data, present findings, and analyze results. From creating and administering a survey to developing custom reporting and presentation of results (and everything in between), Consentia ensures excellence in Descriptive and Diagnostic Analytics. Descriptive Analytics answers the question “What Happened?” with Diagnostic Analytics answering the question “Why Did This Happen?” With the incredible enhancements in the field of AI, Consentia is poised to further our abilities to also include Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics, which analyzes data to predict what could happen and in turn utilizes this forecast to indicate how we can make a desired outcome occur.

The future is incredibly bright for this immensely exciting wave of analytics!

February 13, 2019

Data Security by Process Design: The Next Step for IT and IP Protection

I was sitting next to a HoneyBadger Bitcoin employee on a plane a few months ago – he was moving forward their kiosk deployment across Canada and I was half asleep heading home from Seattle – and finally got an answer to a question I’d been wondering for a long time: How do those ‘in the know’ secure their wallet numbers and passwords when everything is hackable?

His answer: pen, paper, safety deposit box. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but that certainly wasn’t it.

^ Yup. Still a thing. (Getty Images)

That message, in context with last week’s news that QuadrigaCX has now forever lost access to ‘cold wallets’ worth over $160 million – and the record $865 million dollars worth of coins stolen from exchanges around the world in 2018 alone, now makes a little more sense.

Pen, paper, safety deposit box indeed.

Electronic thieves have innovated. Clever phishing emails, fake websites and spoofed email addresses (many of you have seen them I’m sure) have taken over the ‘ prince’ emails. Faked wiring instructions from colleagues, fraudulent CRA phone calls and mysterious banking password verifications all seek to get through the IT infrastructure we’ve set up to protect ourselves with verified credentials. You don’t need a hack when you can convince targets to bring you behind the ‘silicon’ curtain – or avoid it altogether. Even blockchain security can’t prevent a compromised user from making changes to secure data.

^ A ‘Londoning’ Scam – One of the originals. When in doubt, call the hotel directly. Their confusion will be real. That, and your friend is really back in town but just doesn’t want to listen to your story about your dog. That happens.

Unlike an IT hack – a failure of your infrastructure to withstand attack – we are countering a new and different threat: a digital version of the failure of checks and balances that plague many businesses. Growth – especially in small, founder-led businesses – doesn’t often permit the vigilance of enforcement required to prevent financial ‘leakages’ (to use my colleague Salima’s favorite term). Founders need to sell, sell and sell again. Even with expense trackers like Expensify and small business back-office apps like (the rather brilliant, Edmonton-based Jobber), there remains gaps in our ability to provide the requisite checks and balances that will keep our money safe from phantom bills or instructions.

^ We <3 you, M-Files

Our solution – the best solution (though we may be biased) – is to fill the gap between costs and approvals by cementing your checks and balances digitally. A strong document management system (we use MFiles – it does this seamlessly) can build processes that manage file interactions – necessitating approvals, ensuring completeness, and protect against versioning errors – that mirror the numerous processes you already use to operate your business. We will also evaluate your processes with you to ensure that those that we are recreating accomplish the security tasks they are meant to.

That said, with or without us, I would implore you to protect your critical processes. Create a strict, two-stage process – both verbal and electronic – on how wire transfers, cheques over a certain amount, payment orders and confirmations, how users’ passwords get changed and updated and the digital permissions required for your employees access secure data. Ensure that passwords are changed at the very least biannually (the more the better, but people absolutely hate this I recognize). And, most importantly, keep a data trail – in some way – of these processes. The more automated and unbiased the better.

January 15, 2019

Data – Businesses’ ‘Gig’ Economy

Business has a new, annoying buzz word to go along with ‘synergies’, ‘disruption’, ‘productize’ and ‘jargon’. (If you haven’t had enough, venture over to Forbes’ list here to make your stomach churn further. Never have I hated clickbait so much). We all use them and it becomes increasingly painful to hear.

The ‘Gig Economy’ has become ubiquitous amongst MBAs and millennials, variously defined as the empowerment of underutilized supply, the biggest threat in the hotel/taxicab/power company/cable/restaurant/communications business and the latest, best ‘side hustle’ for people to make a bit more money. We might have predicted it (though, of course, hindsight allows us to have predicted anything, really). Economic theory posits that supply and demand will always tending towards equilibrium regardless of market pressures one way or another. Our vast supply of ‘things’ – cars, homes, hours in a day – that drive the gig economy can now be maximized to the very last minute and dollar.

Our data is no different. The information gleaned from our data has made Google rich, newspapers poor, people amused by the ‘People who purchased this item also purchased …’ section on Amazon and nerds (myself included) to search vast electromagnetic radiation records to search for extraterrestrial life with SETI. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is case in point; every data point in a vast sea of knowledge can be used for profit whether we realize it or not. We didn’t know our Facebook friends could indicate so much of our political preferences, but once someone had the data they found a way to use it. For predictive data analysis, maintaining institutional knowledge across generations or microtargeting for promotions, every data point tells a story, every time. Data – in every business – is now our most valuable IP, conceivably worth millions more than the innovations that created it.

Every business collects data, be it on sheets of paper, floppy disks, CDs or in cloud storage. Our customer history, level of purchasing, payment turnaround, revenue turnover, consulting or service hours and more. There is no corporate ‘Marie Kondo’ to cleanse us of our data lust – we collect and keep everything.

We now know the power this corporate data has. We can predict our clients’ future purchasing decisions, understand which SKUs to purchase and terminate and figure out which client or vendor gives us the greatest return on time or money invested. And every business has it.

We generally let this gold stay in the ground, though. It sits in a warehouse, or a basement, or a garage and degrades. That data can be worth thousands, feeding future growth and getting us back in touch with our best clients. Evidence surrounds us. Immense value can be generated from the throwaway details sitting in banker’s boxes and our unsearchable scanned records. We blame expense, time, manpower and ‘more important things’ to ignore it.

This is no longer reason enough – or true enough – to let our data go to waste.

We at Consentia use AI, exceptionally efficient staff and ‘smart’ hardware to sort, read and enter the precise data you want automatically (and discard that which you don’t), process and verify documents for completeness, meta-tag your information and securely deposit it in your document management system, data vault, accounting system, cloud storage or on floppy disks in large cardboard boxes (if you so chose – for some reason). Whatever you need to digitize, however you want to present it and at a price and schedule that meets your needs (without blowing your budgets).

The gig economy has taught us to take every skill, asset, or piece of knowledge we have – driving our cities, taking tourists to the sites and sounds of our homes, selling power to our utility grids from solar panels amongst others – and derive the maximum value out of it. Our data is no different. It’s time to make it work.

« First ‹ Prev 10 11 1213