How to Start Data-Driven Document Management with Avokaado

In today’s fast-paced business environment, managing documents, workflows, and compliance manually can lead to inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and significant legal risks. Legacy systems often fail to provide the transparency, automation, and compliance capabilities that modern companies need to stay competitive. This is where Avokaado comes in.

Avokaado is an intelligent document management platform that helps organizations implement a data-driven approach, achieving this through a powerful three-pillar framework that focuses on full transparency, automation, and compliance on autopilot. In this guide, we’ll walk through how your company can start using Avokaado to transform your document management process.

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Why Data-First Document Management Matters?

Before we dive into the details, let’s take a moment to understand why a data-driven approach to document management is critical for modern businesses. The traditional ways of managing documents—manually or through legacy systems—are no longer enough for businesses aiming for growth, operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance. 

Most Document Management (DMS) and Contract Management (CLM) products on the market today follow a "Document-1st, Data-Maybe" approach, often duplicating each other's functionalities, which leads to overlaps and confusion for users. In these systems, the legal document itself takes precedence, and any associated data is often an afterthought, if accessible at all. When data is available, it is usually extracted from documents using document-scraping techniques that rely on machine learning (ML) and generative AI tools. These methods, while innovative, are layered on top of legacy architectures that were never designed for modern, data-centric workflows. The result is that contract data remains trapped within documents, making it hard to access, analyze, or integrate into other business processes in real-time. 

Instead of scraping data from documents after the fact, businesses could take a data-first approach, where contracts are built around structured, real-time data. This approach shifts the focus to contract data as the core, treating every contract as a persistent, real-time enterprise system of record.Rather than viewing contracts as static PDFs or Word files, a data-first Operational Intelligence Platform (OIP, like Avokaado) creates a dynamic foundation where contract terms, parties, and clauses are structured and fully integrated into business systems. OIP replaces the need for multiple tools such as CLM, signing solutions, document management systems, contract automation, and workflow automation. Documents are generated around this structured data, ensuring that contracts remain dynamic, flexible, and deeply connected to the company’s operational workflows and compliance rules.

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Why Choose a Data-First Approach?

• Accessibility of Data: In a data-first system, every piece of contract information—terms, parties, dates, obligations—becomes easily accessible and actionable. There’s no need to scrape documents for critical information because it’s already structured, searchable, and integrated into your systems.
• Real-Time Updates: OIP allows for real-time updates and changes across your contract and documents portfolio. If contract terms need to be amended, you can update the data at its source and automatically regenerate the document, rather than revising the entire contract manually.
• Automation and Workflow Optimization: When data is at the core of contract management, it’s much easier to automate processes. For example, contract approvals, renewals, and compliance checks can all be triggered based on the underlying data, ensuring processes run efficiently without human intervention.
• Seamless Compliance: With structured data, businesses can integrate compliance requirements directly into their workflows. By using OIP, documents are always aligned with evolving regulations like GDPR, NIS2, and others. Compliance is not a reactive process but an integral part of the business lifecycle.
• Enhanced Business Intelligence: By focusing on contract data first, business can unlock powerful insights into its contract portfolio, analyze trends, predict risks, and identify opportunities across all contracts because the data is structured, trackable, and integrated with your business systems.
• Data Reliability: Compared to legacy systems where data is scraped from PDFs and Word files, a data-first approach ensures the accuracy of data as the basis for any business decisions and analyses, providing a reliable foundation for operations and growth.

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Business Value of Building Contracts Around Data

Focusing on data-first contract management provides a clear competitive advantage by ensuring contracts are not just documents but living assets. Legal clauses and terms are structured around this data, meaning contracts are not static but dynamic tools that evolve in sync with business processes. In this approach, documents become a representation of the underlying data, not the other way around. This gives businesses:

1. Greater Agility in managing contract changes.
2. Increased Compliance with regulatory standards.
3. Improved Decision-Making through real-time data analysis.
4. Faster Execution of contract-related tasks through automation.

By adopting a data-first OIP approach, businesses can unlock the full potential of document management, transforming it from a burdensome task into a strategic function that drives efficiency, compliance, and growth.

The 3 Pillars of Avokaado OIP Framework

Avokaado’s platform revolves around a simple but powerful three-pillar framework that addresses the fundamental challenges of modern document management: visibility, efficiency, and compliance. This framework is designed to empower companies to operate smoothly while minimizing risk and maximizing operational control. Here’s how each pillar supports your business objectives:

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1. Full Transparency

What it Means:
Complete visibility is essential for modern organizations to manage their business relationships, documents, and data in real time. With Avokaado, you can view every document's status, associated parties, and any linked data, ensuring transactional single source of truth of all your business relationships and accurate system of records.

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Why It Matters:
Transparency is key for making informed decisions, identifying bottlenecks, and ensuring accountability within teams. When you know exactly where each document stands in its lifecycle, it becomes easier to prioritize, collaborate, and follow up, all while reducing the risk of missed deadlines or lost documents. For industries such as manufacturing, insurance, healthcare, and finance, full transparency can even reduce regulatory risks by ensuring that all necessary documentation is easily accessible and up-to-date.

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How Avokaado Does It:
Avokaado’s centralized document management dashboard with data registries based on document types provides a real-time view of all documents, contracts, and processes. Advanced search and filter functionalities allow you to quickly access critical information about any document, relationship, or transaction and segment data as you want. All changes to the documents and data records are logged, giving you a clear audit trail of document history, including who accessed or edited the document, and when. Avokaado uses AI and document type based data models to extract data into data and party registries from legacy and incoming documents and smart automation for ongoing/outgoing documents.

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2. Smart Automations

What it Means:
Manual processes are time-consuming, prone to errors and so out-dated. Avokaado enables businesses to automate the creation, management, and execution of documents, while also automating operational workflows like contract renewals, tasks, naming, foldering etc. Automation consists of dynamic template creation (document(s) flow) with process automation (workflow)).

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Why It Matters:
Efficiency is a cornerstone of competitive advantage. By automating repetitive tasks, businesses can focus their resources on more strategic activities and achieve compliance on autopilot via using built-in processes. Automations reduce human error and create consistent, predictable outcomes across workflows and teams. For growing businesses, this means the ability to scale without proportionally increasing administrative overhead for legal departments and enabling teams to own and scale their workflows and teams without increase of compliance and legal risks.

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How Avokaado Does It:
Through Avokaado, you can set up customizable templates, workflows, and decision trees. For instance, clauses in legal documents can be automated to change based on specific data inputs or choices, ensuring the final document is legally correct and aligned with business's needs. Automated workflows like data flows and document approvals and signatures speed up processes and eliminate unnecessary manual steps and errors in infosystems or kicking the document back to the start. By using intelligent automation and Avokaado smart document format aDoc, Avokaado can dynamically adjust documents based on input, connect data flows making sure they reflect real-time business data and trigger right tasks.

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3. Compliance on Autopilot

What it Means:
Maintaining compliance with internal company policies and ever-evolving external regulations is a challenge for many organizations. Avokaado ensures automatic adherence to regulations such as GDPR, NIS2, and other industry-specific laws by integrating compliance requirements directly into organization’s document workflows.

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Why It Matters:
Failure to comply with regulations can lead to fines, legal actions, and damaged reputations. For businesses operating in highly regulated industries, compliance is non-negotiable. When compliance is integrated directly into your document management process, your organization can rest assured that it’s always audit-ready and protected against regulatory risk. Moreover, when compliance is automated, it frees up your teams from worrying about tracking regulations manually and helps prevent costly mistakes.

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How Avokaado Does It:
Avokaado provides built-in compliance that aligns with the latest regulatory frameworks. Whether you’re dealing with GDPR data privacy laws or industry-specific regulations like health and safety rules, Avokaado ensures that all organizations following this 3-pillar framework achieve compliance on autopilot. The platform maintains a detailed record of all compliance-related actions, making it easier to provide documentation during audits or investigations. You can also set up alerts and reminders for document renewals or compliance deadlines, ensuring that nothing is overlooked.

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Step-by-Step Guide to Data-Driven Document Management with Avokaado

Now that you understand the importance of a data-driven approach, let’s get practical and start with step-by-step guide on how to manage your documents efficiently and achieve full compliance on autopilot with Avokaado

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STEP 1. Centralize Your Documents in Avokaado

The first step in transitioning to data-driven document management is to centralize all your documents per business unit or document type in Avokaado. This process involves migrating your documents from any legacy system into Avokaado’s platform and achieving full transparency of all your business relationships, data and documents.

What:
Migrate and organize all your legacy documents (created before Avokaado and stored eg in Sharepoint) into Avokaado's data-driven document management system.

How:

• Create Folder Structures: Design folder hierarchies based on your business needs (by department, project, client, etc.).
• Upload Documents: Import all relevant documents into their respective folders.
• Create a Data Model: Go to the Document Type section and create a data model that fits your document types you upload (eg Employment contracts as a type or Vendor Agreements).
• Apply Document Types: Apply document types to each folder, allowing for easy categorization.
• AI-Powered Data Input: Avokaado’s AI will automatically extract data to Parties registry and Data registry from each document.
• Review and Refine: Review the results, and adjust any information as needed. All adjustments are logged.

Why:
This step provides full transparency into your business relationships, documents, and data. Having a live, real-time data record ensures you can easily track all your documents and their corresponding data across departments.

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STEP 2. Automate Process Templates in Avokaado

Automation is at the heart of Avokaado's platform. You can build templates, workflows and tasks that automatically handle document generation, approvals, and other tasks.

What:
Automate the creation and handling of documents, tasks and workflows.

How:

• Access the Template Automation Section: Build templates for different document types and data models based on your company’s specific needs.
• Create Interdependencies: Insert clauses and interdependencies for decision trees (e.g., clauses appear or change based on the data inserted or choices made in the document).
• Build Automated Tasks: Set rules for folder organization, approval and digital signing process, new document generation from executed one, notifictaions etc.

Why:
Automation not only saves time but also ensures greater accuracy. By setting up automated workflows, you reduce the need for manual reviews, improve document generation control, and maintain compliance without constant oversight. This increases overall operational efficiency and enables easily expanding the team to new locations and offices ensures 

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STEP 3. Onboard Your Teams to the Platform

The final step in your journey towards data-driven document management is onboarding your team. Ensuring that your team has the right access and tools is crucial for making the most out of Avokaado’s features.

What:
Provide access to the platform for your team members, enabling them to manage documents and processes efficiently.

How:

• Set Up Access Rights: Use Single Sign-On (SSO) and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) for seamless login integration with Azure, Google, or other identity providers.
• Assign User Groups: Group users by role or department, assigning them access to the necessary templates and folders.
• Configure Permissions: Make sure each user has the correct level of access according to company policies, ensuring adherence to GDPR and internal protocols.
• Create spaces: sort teams and /or companies into separate spaces to extra level of access controls and compliance
• Monitor Activities: Avokaado tracks all access and interactions, providing full transparency over user activity (logs), use 360 view to monitor on you dashboard all workflows and tasks actively running.

Why:
By managing access through Avokaado, you ensure that employees only see the documents, templates, and knowledge bases they need to perform their jobs, ensuring GDPR compliance and reducing security risks. This also simplifies onboarding and offboarding, making it easier to manage employees as your company grows.

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When You Already Use Avokaado and Want to Upgrade to OIP

If you're already using Avokaado and have Step 2 (automation) and Step 3 (team onboarding) in place, but want to upgrade your existing system to an Operational Intelligence Platform (OIP), the process is simple. First, evaluate your current processes and documents to ensure they align with the three OIP pillars: transparency, automation, and compliance.

If you find that document types are missing, or data and party records are incomplete, you'll need to work with document types and data models to achieve accuracy. After that, upload any existing documents for data extraction onto the platform to ensure full transparency. Once these steps are completed, you can expand the system by adding more stakeholders to the platform with the relevant access rights.

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Industry-Specific Use Cases

Let’s take a look at how different industries can leverage Avokaado OIP beyond traditional document management and automation:

• Banking and Finance: Avokaado enables end-to-end automation of document generation and data flows between core banking systems, credit systems, OIP, and internet banking platforms. For example, it supports processes like leasing, insurance, private or corporate loans, guarantees, and more, ensuring seamless data exchange and compliance.
• Healthcare: Avokaado provides end-to-end employee compliance management, and automating processes for clinical trials, equipment, and pharmaceutical product ordering and sales etc. This ensures regulatory adherence while streamlining critical healthcare operations. All data and parties are nicely structured and connected with documents as a system of record.
• Manufacturing: Avokaado facilitates durable goods compliance by providing a comprehensive system for tracking all customers and generating Know Your Customer (KYC) data forms. This enables manufacturers to maintain compliance while managing customer relationships efficiently.

• Banking and Finance:
  Avokaado creates a data record of all vendors providing services to the bank, supporting core services management and ensuring compliance with vendor agreements and regulatory requirements.
• Hospitality:
  Avokaado offers full transparency into hotel operation agreements, allowing businesses to track operational costs and manage partners centrally. This centralization ensures better control over operational efficiency and compliance.

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Operation-Specific Use Cases examples

Let’s take a look at how different business units can leverage Avokaado OIP:

• Legal Operations enables business units with automated contract drafting, ensuring compliance with GDPR when managing client and employee data.
• HR Department automates the entire hiring process through Avokaado, creating a comprehensive employee data registry and integrating seamlessly with HRIS and recruitment platforms.
• Legal Team automates global revenue and sales operations with Avokaado, managing partner and customer data registries while ensuring transparency. AI-driven data extraction from legacy documents ensures that historical data becomes actionable. The legal team can quickly identify contracts with penalty clauses or determine which parties haven’t signed NDAs, then automate amendments to ensure compliance.
• Sales Team tracks customers who haven’t experienced a price adjustment in years, enabling more informed revenue strategies.
• Business Development Team gains real-time insights to inform expansion plans, pricing strategies, and market positioning.
• Marketing Team automates signing influencer agreements with GDPR requirements, organizing all collected data into data tables. This setup enables easy deletion once relationships are terminated, retention periods have expired, or a deletion request is made by the party.‍
• IT Team connects data flows using Avokaado (aDoc) with existing and emerging information systems without requiring expensive additional development.‍
• C-Level gains full transparency of all business relationships, enabling informed decision-making. This insight allows for strategic team adjustments and the easy expansion of teams as needed.

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Time-Savings and ROI

Implementing Avokaado can lead to significant time and cost savings. Automating document workflows and compliance tasks can reduce manual workloads by up to 80%, freeing up time for higher-value tasks. This not only improves efficiency but also reduces the risk of costly compliance failures.

Security and Compliance Features

Avokaado OIP is built on a robust security and compliance framework. The platform ensures that:

• Private Workspace: All company data is kept separate from other customers, and security levels and requirements are easily configurable and monitored, including every integration created.
• Data Encryption: Encryption is applied to all documents and transactions, ensuring data remains secure at all times.
• Audit Trails: A clear record of all activities is maintained, making audits and investigations straightforward and transparent.
• Regulatory Compliance: Compliance with regulations like GDPR, NIS2, and others is managed seamlessly, ensuring that your organization always meets legal requirements.

By following this step-by-step guide, your business can fully leverage Avokaado’s powerful features to achieve data-driven document management. With full transparency, smart automations, and compliance on autopilot, you can focus on growing your business while ensuring all your document-related processes are running smoothly in the background.

Avokaado offers a comprehensive contract lifecycle management platform that can streamline and optimize every stage of the contract management process. From automated contract creation to secure storage and compliance tracking, Avokaado provides the tools necessary to manage contracts efficiently and effectively. By leveraging Avokaado's user-friendly platform, businesses can reduce manual work, minimize errors, and ensure consistency across their contract management practices. To see how Avokaado can transform your contract management workflow, visit https://avokaado.io/ for more information, request a demo, or create a free account.