The importance of a Document Generation software

OVERVIEW

Many people get confused about the differences between reporting software and document generation software. The author tends to personally agree with the fact that there exists a thin line that separates these two types of software. A simple definition of both is therefore required.

• A reporting software basically pulls already stored data from files, formats the data and presents it in a more meaningful and appealing way. A report is usually a summary of all the data collected and verified during a specified time frame.
• A document generation software may essentially do the same thing but it may not create a report at all. A document can range from letters, purchase orders, quotations, sub reports, reports, applications etc

The difference lies in the fact that, while reports can be entirely generated by the software, this may not be true for certain documents like letters. While we can automate the creation of certain parts of a document, some part of the content will definitely be manually created. Here is an example that clarifies things.
Imagine a sales and purchase executive in an organization. His job consists of validating the sales and monitoring the raw material purchases made by the organization. He also has to maintain an inventory of the raw materials.
He uses reporting software to submit daily inventory, sales and purchase reports to his immediate boss. This process is automatic as he inputs all his data in a database. All the software has to do is to pull that data, format it, create a report and send it to his boss via email.
That very person now decides to send a quotation to a third party for purchase of certain raw materials. This time he uses document generation software that creates a quotation using predefined document templates. All he has to do is enter the quantity and purchase rate. Depending upon the funds allocated and storage space available, he may also decide to order in bulk to further reduce the cost of purchase.
As can be seen such decisions cannot be taken by the document generation software and require human ingenuity and bargaining skills. This is what essentially defines the difference between document generation software and reporting software. A software is designed to reduce the redundancy of tasks and thereby reduce the time taken to complete that very task. The document generation software is no exception to this rule.
The document generation software should ideally support the following features:

1. It should support the creation of standard document types and also allow the user to create custom templates to suit their own needs. Not all types of documents may be in standard format.
2. It should support automatic form filling if possible. If certain values in a standard form do not change, this feature can be implemented. Certain documents like letters, quotations etc, will, in most cases, contain the similar content for the address, salutation, and opening and closing remarks section. These contents and their variations should be known to the document generation software.
3. It should be well integrated and/or should support the popular formats of storing documents. This allows those documents to be opened on some other computer.
4. It should enforce a standard and therefore warn the user when a documentation standard is being violated. This should ideally be done at run time i.e. the user should be notified on the fly as soon as a standard is violated.

Apart from these, ease of use, after sales support, fewer occurrences of errors, fast operation, compatibility with major third party software, reliability etc are some of the qualities that go without saying.
The fact remains that "document generation software" are being accepted in many organizations around the world because of the aforementioned qualities and features that they provide. The most important reasons why an organization or a user opts for document generation software in lieu of manual creation of the same are speed, accuracy and ease of use. All these three qualities in turn lead to the following:

1. Increased Productivity: As less time is spent on creating a document and correcting any errors, the end user has more time and resources that can be best used in some other productive way.
2. Better and effieicent use of organization/personal resources: A benefit that can be inferred from 1) above. Since those human/computational resources spend less time to do the redundant tasks, they are more readily available.
3. Shorter learning curve: Most document generation software are easy to use. The technicalities and intricacies of the same too can be easily inferred as the use of the software in the organization increases.

TO SUM IT UP,

The use of document generation software will only become more prevalent in the future, as computational resources like processor speed, RAM size, increases while hindering factors like lag, network and processor latency, overall power consumption etc decreases. This in turn would allow software designers to design more complex software which can be intelligent as well. This would further reduce the workload of the end user as most software programs would have some "intelligence" that will allow them to take certain simple decisions on their own.