Document management is the creation, storage and retrieval of documents, whether or not you are pro-actively manging the documents your business already creates, stores and retrieves each and every day. The process can be very time consuming and often ignored, the consequences of not having a proper document management system in place can range from unhappy and unproductive staff right through to the loss information with the worst impact being the loss of your business altogether.

Why a document management system?

In having a document management system, you are digitizing the way you work which means less paper. Paper has been around since the beginning of time and certainly has its uses, but documents in your working office is in many cases no longer one of them. The tiresome and laborious task of searching through treasure troves of files to finally find the document you were looking for in the complete wrong box should be no more. Did you know that 80% of documents that are stored incorrectly are never found?

Beyond the actual cost of paper, filing, storing and searching for the documents, digitizing internal paper-based systems will reduce printing and other operational costs. The time it takes to move paper through an organisation is slow, a document management system will streamline your processes thus giving you and your staff more time to work on further growing your business.

There are many more benefits to a document management system, how many times have you had to recreate a document you know you have had before but now cannot be found anywhere? A study carried out suggests that 83% of people have to recreate documents that already exists because it can not be found on their internal network, a document management system would eliminate that as the data is all stored in one central location which provides a single version of the truth.

During these recent unprecedented times it has never been more crucial to companies that documents are easily accessible from anywhere, “I have a shared drive that we can access from anywhere” I hear you say, great you have moved away from paper and fully understand the need to digitise documents in your business but how compliant is that for business use? What would a data breach mean for your business? In many cases this could lead to financial fines but more importantly there are many examples of this leading to loss of reputation with no way back for the business. A Document management system give you 100% traceability and transparency with detailed logging and analysis of all actions meaning you will have full control over document versions, changes and processes. Access to a document management system is based on a complex permission structure which include different permissions for reading, saving, processing, exporting, editing or even deleting data. This helps to organise all your operations in a way that keeps your data, documents but most importantly your staff and customer information confidential and protected.

So, what’s next? I would like to invite you to take the opportunity of a FREE, No Obligation discovery meeting where I will complete a survey of your business workflow processes and provide a complementary advice document for any approvals which could benefit and strengthen your business moving forwards.