Answer
A quick way to tell the two apart is to trace one document through its actual life cycle and time each stage. If most of the delay happens before anyone starts working on the document, someone hunting through email, a shared drive, or a filing cabinet to locate it, that points to a retrieval and repository problem. If the document is found quickly but then sits waiting for a signature, a review, or a handoff between departments, the bottleneck is process, not storage, and workflow automation is the higher-value investment.
Many platforms bundle both capabilities, but buyers should not assume they need to buy or configure both on day one. Starting with just the piece that matches the actual bottleneck keeps the project simpler to implement and easier to prove out, and workflow automation can be layered on later once the repository and indexing foundation is solid. Buying full workflow automation to solve what is really a search problem tends to produce an expensive routing system for documents nobody had trouble finding to begin with.