Document Management, Workflow and Records Management News

Yoda Says: Read Document Management Best Practices from Star Wars, You Will

I love Star Wars. I've watched the original trilogy at least 50 times, but yesterday, I realized something new that I never noticed before.

I realized that the Luke, Leia, Han Solo and the Rebel army were able to bring down Darth Vader because of Empire's poor document management. Let's just say I was quite pumped to share my realization with you all.

Without a document management policy in place, corporations can put themselves at a grave security risk. Granted, Darth Vader may not be stomping around the halls at your work, putting people into choke holds, but companies' whose documents aren’t prepared for an audit might feel the vice-like grip of stress on them. That’s why I’ve derived a 4 document management best practices from the totally amazing, intergalactic adventure Star Wars:

Several Documents Were Beamed to This Ship by Rebel Spies. 

“If this is a consular ship, where is the ambassador? — Commander, tear this ship apart until you’ve found those plans. And bring me the passengers, I want them alive!” – Darth Vader

All industries should retain a simple to use, secure and powerful online repository of all documents, including email. This is especially important for industries that need to meet rigorous compliance, regulation and reporting requirements.

The Empire had no such solution. At the beginning of ‘A New Hope’ misguided Ex-Jedi Knight, Darth Vader is choking the captain of a ship that is carrying Princess Leia, supposedly on a diplomatic mission to Alderaan. The truth is, she’s carrying very important plans for the Death Star, a mega-weapon created by the Empire.

Now, I’m not saying that the Empire should have triumphed, but if they had a document management system in place they’d have better control on what documents are going out and coming in to their organization. Darth Vader wouldn’t have to tear the ship apart looking for the plans because they would be safely and securely stored inside the Empire’s document management system and not taking a galactic tour of the universe Rebel hands. In addition, Vader could have set restrictions on who could view the plans; even if there was a breach of some kind, Vader could get a list of individuals who had access to view the document and easily see who most recently handled the file.

Help me, Document Access Management. You’re My Only Hope

General Tagge: What of the Rebellion? If the Rebels have obtained a complete technical reading of this station, it is possible, however unlikely, they might find a weakness and exploit it. 

Darth Vader: The plans you refer to will soon be back in our hands. 

The Empire isn’t the only one who needs better access management controls on critical documents.

Leia sends R2D2 with an important message for Obi-Wan Kenobe, but not only does the message go astray, after a few wiggles of his screwdriver, Luke Skywalker (a person who at the time she didn’t even know) is able to free the message and view it. With a document management solution in place, only Obi-Wan Kenobe would have had access to a message addressed to him.

Companies that used a paper-based system of file management often run into similar problems. Though emails get a message or file gets to the person you want, companies that keep large amounts of hard files may find that sensitive files are misfiled or simply lost. Yes, Leia put her trust in R2D2 to deliver her important message, but what if it had fallen in the wrong hands?

These Aren’t the Documents You’re Looking For

Obi-Wan These aren't the droids you're looking for.
Stormtrooper These aren't the droids we're looking for.
Obi-Wan: He can go about his business.
Stormtrooper: You can go about your business.

Lost documents can mean drastic consequences for companies.

For the healthcare industry, explanation of benefits processing can become a nightmare when not handled properly. EOB’s can be hundreds of pages long sometimes and the cost to print, file and maintain up-to-date information can cost enormous expenditure. When income is based on payment from insurance companies, healthcare providers can’t afford to misfile, lose or misplace an EOB.

Remember, how those poor weak-minded Stormtroopers in Star Wars were so easily convinced (visa vis the Force)? The droids that they were looking for were right in front of them! That little memory lapse cost the Empire quite a lot. As I recall, it cost them everything. Similarly, lost healthcare documents are a huge risk for healthcare providers since there are so many compliance issues surround the information shared through them. HIPAA protects patients from mismanagement of patient information. Healthcare facilities can get slapped with fines when they’re not fully compliant.

The Cloud is with You, Always

The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together. - Obi-Wan

When you save your work in the cloud, your work is always with you. In our plugged in, technology-driven world, you’re never too far away from a wi-fi connection. As more and more people choose to work remotely, the need for cloud-based document management solutions have increased. People need their files where they choose to work. They don’t want to choose to work near their files.

The Rebel Army is able to defeat the Empire because they have the ability to tap into a resource that is always with them – the Force. As Obi-Wan say, “It binds the galaxy together.” Your document management system should hold all your documents in one, central place that you can access wherever the power of good takes you. 

featured photos licensed through the Creative Commons by oswaldo, reway, dyanna, kalexanderson, and Gilderic Photography. 

Transform Your Document Storage and Retrieval Process into a Strategy

Over the past few years, I've worked as an inbound marketing consultant for B2B organizations across the US and Canada. During that time, many documents have passed through my field of vision. I’ve had documents emailed, shared through the cloud, printed, and scanned to me. I feel as if I've seen it all. 

Looking back I realize, few companies had a formal system for sharing documents; some had virtually no policy at all. Too often the document storage and retrieval process was seemingly dictated not by what solution worked best in keeping documents safe and accessible to those who need them, but on employee or manager preference at the time. 

Though the availability of saas document management has certainly helped companies get out of their file cabinet and into the cloud, companies struggle the document storage and retrieval process for electronic files, too. Fortunately, company decision makers can put a kibosh on unstructured document sharing and storage and begin viewing document management as a holistic policy central to a healthy business. Here's how: 

Believe that Documents Should Live in One Place

Take a mental snapshot of your current document management infrastructure for your team. Think about the variety of different ways that people in your organization share files, how many emails are exchanged a day, and the number of small changes made to documentation by multiple people. Think about all the documentation that lives on each employee’s desktop computer and how many times that computer was reformatted during its lifetime with your company. Now, try to think about how someone would find a document from 5 years ago by someone no longer at the company. Do you feel overwhelmed yet? You should. A Coopers & Lybrand study in Inc Magazine estimated that it cost $120 to search for a misfiled document.

Trust that Collaboration Should Be Secure and Easy

According to Forester Research, more than 34 Million people telecommute 1 to 4 every week in the US. As the number progresses to an estimated 63 million, you may find that your employees need a clear electronic document management policy and document management system in place to keep documents secure when accessed virtually.

When individual employees dictate the electronic document management policy in your organization, documents are forced to live in multiple places. Collaboration between teams can transform into a scavenger hunt to find the latest version of a document rather than focusing on the work itself. For highly collaborative departments (marketing, HR) that interact with a variety of different teams, important conversations about documents should take place in a central, secure location. Even if the company has an intranet where documents are saved; it’s helpful for teams to be able to access the entire history of that document and comments at a glance. Documents (and their context) should not disappear when someone goes on vacation.

Be a Proponent of Document Security

Imagine that in the course of a year three employees leave your organization and several freelancers come and go.

Document management software can make turning off the flow of information to someone no longer in the company easier, as that countless information could be accessible after an individual leaves the company. My email archive is full of documentation from past employers and a quick search in my Google Docs reveals I still have access to documents shared through that portal, too. Companies should be able to easily and quickly terminate someone’s access to company documentation in an instant.

Realize that Email Isn't a Helpful On-Boarding Tool

Starting an employee off on the right foot can be challenging for any organization, but it’s especially difficult for organizations without an electronic document management policy and document management system.

Think about the time it takes to send email after email of documentation to a new employee. Imagine how much easier it would be to welcome a new employee to your organization if they could log-in to one document management software and discover all the files they are permitted access to right away, including HR files that need to be filled out on their first day.

- Shannon Sweetser

 

featured licensed through the Creative Commons, by Victor.

Creating Jobs with Online Document Management and Workflow Software

It seems we are hearing more and more about “job creation” these days. But while the politicians continue to pontificate on the wisdom of enacting further corporate tax cuts to encourage job creation, it’s important to remember that there are other ways that you can control to find the capital necessary to increase your workforce and your bottom line. Many of these savings can be realized quickly by leveraging the benefits of on-demand document management and workflow software.

The True Cost of “Creating a Job”

Politicians, traders, economists, and various business leaders…are all debating on what it will take to chisel down unemployment and create more jobs. But with all this rhetoric, you may not know the actual cost of adding an employee to a company payroll.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the cost of adding a job breaks down as follows:

$40,630.20 (Base Wage; the average weekly earnings for a private sector worker according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics is $781.35 x 52 weeks)

+

$17,064.68 (Benefits and tax cost; the BLS says that for every $1 in wages, employer costs for taxes and benefits are $0.42)

= $57,967.88 (Total Annual Direct Costs to employers for the average worker)

Wow!  And that figure doesn’t even include the cost of rent, telephone/internet, computer, or training for the average worker. Experts say these other costs can add thousand of dollars more per year, depending on the specific industry and job requirements.

Now that we’ve established that it’s expensive to add a job, the question becomes how to find operational savings that can help fund new positions for growing companies. Part of the solution can be found in the effective daily use of cloud-based document management and workflow software.

Document Management Provides Immediate Savings to Help Fund Expansion Plans

One the major reasons on-line document management systems have become as prolific and popular as they have in recent years is because their return on investment is nearly always swift and sustainable. Document management can help even the smallest business improve its process management, increase workflow efficiencies, and reduce unnecessary cost and waste. 

How can document management save you money?

Time / Man Hour Savings

With cloud-based document management, all documents and files are received or captured, shared, stored, and retrieved instantly with just a few clicks. This nearly eliminates the manpower and time spent manually processing, filing, retrieving, and re-filing paper documents – which on average takes at least 4 minutes per file.

Have you ever sat in your office and watched the parade to the printer or copier? I have. In fact, I have been in new clients offices and watched their staff make so many trips to the file room, printer and copier that I wonder how they get any work done. They need people just to find, print and deliver the documents all day. The scary part is that they are so used to working like this they don’t see the costs of time associated with these activities.

Assume an employee files and/or retrieves 50 documents daily and then extrapolate that over the course of one year: The labor costs for filing alone totals almost $16,000 and occupies over 830 man hours to complete. 

Document Management Labor Savings Calculator

In contrast, with on-line document management, employees can find and process files in seconds without ever leaving their desk.

Physical Office Space Savings

The average 5-drawer file cabinet occupies 12 square feet of office space when you consider the room it takes to fully open a drawer.  When you multiply this out over 8 full cabinets, your documents take up almost 100 very expensive square feet of space.  At an average cost of $35/square foot annually, those file cabinets are literally costing your business $3,500 every year.  And, we haven’t even addressed offsite document storage and retrieval costs.

Document management also facilitates telecommuting with absolute affordability, security and ease, further decreasing the need to maintain costly office space.

Paper Savings

Working with electronic documents using software that indexes each page so that it can be quickly found – no matter who entered it - can eliminate the need for paper, which can be undeniably substantial.  At $.02 per sheet, multiplied by the average 10,000 sheets of paper handled by employees annually, paper can cost businesses $200 per employee annually. 

Miscellaneous Savings

With the right solution, businesses can effectively reduce the need for ink, toner, postage, courier expenses, costly copy/fax equipment maintenance, and off-site and on-site storage supplies and fees, resulting in additional and immediate savings. 

Business Process and Workflow Automation

Many web-based document management solutions provide a workflow module or offer it as an add-on option. Automated workflow software, especially those that have rules-based workflow helps eliminate repetitive manual tasks associated with routine business processes. 

Routing, reviewing and approving documents can be accomplished in a few seconds versus hours, days or weeks. This in turn, can mean revenue is created faster and frees up staff for higher value activities creating the capital needed to increase sales and marketing efforts for increased business development – which creates jobs!!!

Five Reasons You Should Automate Your Contract Review Process

Marketing, Creativity, Collaboration and Document Management

At first glance, the title may be puzzling.  While one can see the relationship between marketing, creativity and collaboration, where does document management come in?

At Document Advantage Corporation we use our own product, DocuVantage OnDemand, as a marketing tool. It is the front-end of our marketing process. Yes, it is an online document management system and yes, we use it for other purposes too.  But in our marketing efforts, we work as a team.  And as a team, there is a lot of collaboration and review of each other’s efforts.

Let’s use this blog post as an example.

After it was written, it was saved to DocuVantage OnDemand so others on the team could review it, comment and edit.  There is only one copy, or version, of the post and it lives in DocuVantage.  This one and only version was routed, edited and approved.  Every time anyone on the team made changes to the document, the document was checked-out for editing and that revision was automatically stored in the system.  This ensured that no one’s ideas were discarded or lost.  Best of all, it also means that the team was always working with the correct and current version of the document.

So how exactly does this work?

First, a team member, or even an external vendor, creates a document and stores it in the system.  Then, depending upon the type of document it is, it is routed to the correct person.  If they need to edit the document is is checked-out and that revision is automatically stored. Users can add notes and messages within the system maintaining the conversations in one secure location, instead of in emails.

Once the draft is approved we move the status to final, enter the date to publish and then it is uploaded into HubSpot, another marketing tool, and published.  At any time we can query DocuVantage for content by approved or published dates, text, keywords, author, collateral type or any other metadata.

Many of us can work virtually so whether we are traveling or working from home, we need a seamless way to easily access and collaborate on ideas while controlling and protecting the content that is created. Using DocuVantage OnDemand we are automatically connected to our work.

When one person inserts comments, reviews or approves a document, or completes an assigned task, the system notifies the next user.  This iterative process ensures that we produce quality content in the most efficient manner.  We are able to instantly search our repository for the content needed enabling us to re-use previously created collateral versus always beginning from scratch because no one could find the files needed.

However, it’s not just used for blog posts.  Every piece of marketing content is stored in DocuVantage OnDemand.

Our content is always available to the team no matter what it is or where they are.  We even manage tasks and brainstorm ideas within the system.

When was the last time you tried to find the correct logo file needed?

Having worked in other companies’ marketing departments I can tell you that without a document management system people constantly waste time looking for documents and previous marketing campaigns.  Worse yet, the number of times people have lost documents, or duplicated efforts, is almost unbelievable.  Document management eliminates all these issues.

How many steps and how much time is in your content creation, review and approval process?

If you removed the redundancy how much more content could you create for your audience?

 

Document Management Contract for NJPA Members Awarded to DocuVantage

Competitive procurement process results in partnership to provide electronic document management software solutions to schools, governments, and non-profit organizations.

TAMPA, FL, August 31, 2011 -- Document Advantage Corporation has announced its selection by the NJPA, National Joint Powers Alliance, to serve as a preferred provider of Electronic Document Management Software and Services to its fast growing membership of 35,000 organizations.

Now, NJPA members can begin working immediately with a premier document management provider without undertaking a complex, expensive, and lengthy RFP process. NJPA is a member-driven buying cooperative serving public and private schools (K-12 and higher education institutions), state and local governments, and non-profit organizations across the U.S. and Canada at no cost or obligation.

Document Advantage Corporation, also known as DocuVantage, is an industry-leading provider of DocuVantage OnDemand, an integrated software-as-a-service (SaaS) document, information and business process automation solution for commercial, non-profit, healthcare, financial services and government markets.

A certified WMBE company, DocuVantage has been assisting businesses with their document management, workflow and compliance needs since 1999.

"We are proud and excited about this new partnership with NJPA", stated Jana Wiggins, CEO of DocuVantage. "And we are confident in our ability to bring the most powerful, yet affordable document management solution to thousands of new clients. We are looking forward to long and mutually beneficial relationships."

DocuVantage's document management expertise reaches back over two decades. Their flagship product, DocuVantage OnDemand is a web-based subscription solution that was the industry's first enterprise-class content management SaaS platform to include web document capture, indexing, global OCR/text content searching, rules-based workflow, email archiving, and records management compliance.

Under NJPA contract #051311-DAC, members can purchase DocuVantage software and services easily and affordably to streamline their organization with an immediate return on investment. Capture, share, edit with version control, route, track, control and securely archive all documents that drive business processes while maintaining compliance.

NJPA, a non-profit government agency, establishes and provides national and competitively bid cooperative contracts for municipal governments, educational and non-profit agencies across many industries. Each NJPA-vendor contract and procurement detail is available to all members in 50 states and Canada.

Bruce Orgrodnik, NJPA Contract Manager states, "In our mission to provide the highest quality and purchasing convenience to our valued members, we adhere to stringent policies and protocol in assessing and awarding contract holders. DocuVantage's long-standing history and success providing products and services to the markets we serve is a great value-add. Our members now have access to a partner with the expertise and products to help them streamline, automate and reduce costs within their business. We look forward to our partnership."

About NJPA

NJPA, a non-profit government agency, establishes and provides nationally leveraged and competitively solicited cooperative contracts for municipal governments, educational, and non-profit agencies across many industries in the U.S. and Canada. NJPA creates a business and service relationship alliance between buyers and suppliers. NJPA serves over 35,000 member agencies throughout the nation with competitively bid and awarded purchasing solutions from industry-leading vendors. For more information, visit www.njpacoop.org.

About Document Advantage Corporation

Document Advantage Corporation was founded to provide organizations affordable, flexible and easy-to-use document management solutions and expertise that not only meet your needs today but also continue to grow with your organization. DocuVantage OnDemand, our Software as a Service platform (SaaS), includes document capture, document management, collaboration, business process automation and records management technology enabling you to easily move the documents and information that drive your organization while maintaining compliance.

Whether you begin with secure online file storage that can be accessed from anywhere, or you need to automate your business processes while integrating with other business applications, we can help. Visit us to learn more or give us a call at 866-367-3467 ext. 1.

Protecting Information Assets while Enabling Collaboration

In today’s world, “working from home” is no longer synonymous with inactivity and loss of productivity.  In fact, more than 34 million people in the U.S. telecommute at least one to four days a week and according to IT analytics firm Forrester Research, telecommuting ranks will expand to 63 million by 2016*. The vast majority of telecommuters report spending more time actually being productive versus commuting or combating daily office distractions. 

Although the widespread availability of affordable technology and high speed Internet services have paved the virtual road for telecommuters, one of the biggest challenges is how to continue collaborating efficiently and effectively while maintaining the organization’s information assets. 

Staying Connected as a Telecommuter

According to a recent survey conducted by Staples Advantage**, the B2B division of Staples Inc., telecommuters overwhelmingly rely on e-mail (96%), instant messaging (68%), video conferencing (44%) and unified communications technologies (25%) to stay connected with colleagues in the home office or other off-site locations.

"Because advances in technology continue to help dissolve geographical barriers, companies should also provide their telecommuters with tools that make it easy and efficient to collaborate and stay connected,” says Ed Ludwigson, vice president and general manager for Staples Technology Solutions, the technology products and services division of Staples Advantage.

This flexibility is crucial to a telecommuter’s productivity and success however; it can also lead to temptation. Employees working remotely may be tempted to start saving important documents, records or presentations to their desktops, flash drives, or as e-mail attachments. They are also tempted to take boxes of paper documents home so that they have what they need. These paper documents are typically the original and only copy.

When this happens, documents (and their various versions) are no longer keyword searchable, auditable, or retrievable by other users and colleagues. Worse, without the proper audit and version tracking, there’s absolutely no control over changing document content and therefore, multiple (and unfortunately, incorrect) versions of important information may exist.

Think for a minute: Have you ever gone crazy trying to locate the most recent and “officially blessed” version of a PowerPoint presentation, marketing brochure or contract? You know - the only one that’s been properly vetted, reviewed, revised, and ultimately approved by executives or your corporate legal department?  And then you discover it is residing on Bob’s flash drive, which he left at home or worse, misplaced?

This kind of document disconnect does nothing to further or foster effective collaboration. And it’s precisely the reason it’s so important to develop a departmental strategy for collaboration and integrate the proper supporting technologies.

Productive Collaboration Means User Flexibility, Automatic Tracking, and Streamlined Document Control

For businesses that rely on employees who regularly or even occasionally work from home or a remote office, using an information management platform that includes online document management software with integrated collaboration and compliance tools, becomes the key to efficiency.

Electronic document management, also known as enterprise content management software, allow documents to be captured, stored and controlled centrally with all content instantly searchable by authorized users. Online document management, or browser-based software enable users to access the software from anywhere, anytime using an Internet connection.

Conveniently, audit trails can be provided in many document management systems that automatically track user access and activity information on all records that reside in the system.  But true collaboration needs to go beyond merely tracking documents: True collaboration means tracking changes made to documents with version control and then actively streamlining the workflow process with event-based alerts and track-able task assignments between colleagues.

With automated version control, notes, messages, team member comments, changes, or revisions won’t be lost or duplicated because with a document management system only one person will be allowed to edit a document at any given time.  At the same time, other users still have access to the most recent version of a document and can access prior versions with the click of a mouse.

Document management software with workflow automation allows organizations to easily customize and implement their own rules-based workflows to consistently and transparently apply appropriate guidelines or standards when creating, reviewing or approving documents. Manage the flow, revision and protection of documents within one, secure system without relying on e-mail or network drives. Users can send messages from within the system to multiple team members that will notify them to review a document or, if the document is part of an automated workflow they will automatically receive notifications that they have a task to perform eliminating the need to use e-mail to move documents.

Staff notes about the documents are maintained with the document within the system; no more searching through e-mails to see the conversations related to the documents. One central location for all information related to a document means fast access, document control and increased productivity.

Document Security Concerns Organizations Must Consider

Shockingly, nearly one-third of all U.S. telecommuters admit to never backing up their data, which may jeopardize their organization’s vulnerability to critical data loss or compromise.  This is just another reason it makes sound business sense to implement a single secure repository that will house, protect, and manage your mission critical information.

Can you afford to risk your marketing collateral, board meeting minutes, legal documents, leases and contracts or any document that drives your business?

Contact us to find out how we help businesses of all sizes protect their information and work more efficiently.

*March 2009 report, “U.S. Telecommuting Forecast, 2009 to 2016,” from IT analytics firm Forrester Research

**Staples Advantage conducted the online survey with responses from more than 140 telecommuters at companies of various sizes and across industries. The survey, conducted in May 2011, asked respondents, who work at least one day per week from home, about their home office setup and technology, as well as their overall experiences telecommuting.

Risky Business – NOT!

The 3 Biggest Risks Your Organization Faces and How Web-Based Document Management Insures Against Them

Managing information effectively is perhaps the number one challenge your business faces every day.  Whether you run a large or small organization, information management is the key to success and survival, especially in these uncertain economic times.

Since business information is found, for the most part, in the form of documents or records of some type, organizations that have already adopted true online document management have a significant competitive advantage over those that still rely heavily on manually based paper processes.  Not having a viable document management system that’s geared for future growth and sustainability presents three key business risks:

 1) Information Loss Due To Natural or Man-Made Disaster:

Imagine if one or more of your office locations were destroyed in fire, flood, or hurricane? What if your company was vandalized or broken into and business critical information and data were severely compromised?  How would you explain and provide services to your valuable customers? Could you continue to operate without missing a beat or would they have to call on your competitor?

Although these are certainly worst-case scenarios, they are not uncommon.  Your business, just like your family, must have a plan to be prepared for and power through these types of situations.

One of the best ways to protect your business information is to adopt an online document management platform to help manage paper-based documents as well as digital files. This ensures that all your business information, whether operational or industry-related documentation, insurance policies, contracts, leases, employee applications and personnel files, or accounting and financial records are always protected and secure, yet fully accessible when needed.

In the event of a disaster, online document management software enables continued, yet highly secure access to your documents through a convenient portal via any Internet connection.  Only authorized users can access securely encrypted documents and records in seconds; facilitating your business’s continuity and future sustainability. 

 2) Time and Expense Losses:

There is no way around it -- processing and retaining paper archives is simply too time-consuming and labor intensive in the long term--period.

Paper is expensive to buy and even more costly to store securely in unsightly and space-hogging steel cabinets or warehouse in off-site facilities.  Not only is it difficult to retrieve information from a physical document in a timely manner, it carries with it a range of tasks, leading to subsequent project delays and cost overruns.

Online document management allows users to instantly access all documents from their desk, even if located remotely or internationally.  Documents can be captured, imported, shared and collaborated on, stored and retrieved with a few clicks of the mouse and keyboard.  Documents are indexed as they go into the system allowing the user to search index values or do keyword searching for fast retrieval. This saves incredible amounts of staff time, which can be better spent on more worthy business goals.

By improving real-time collaboration and communication, lowering overhead expenses, and shrinking “time-to-market”, transitioning your organization to a cost-effective web-based document management solution is an important step toward increasing production and profits.

 3) Non-Compliance with Legal Requirements:

Using a safe and secure web-based document management platform, (not a "drop your files" in a network folder or virtual box out on the web) makes meeting compliance laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and HIPAA easier and more organized.  These requirements and others mandate that compliance records are stored in an organized fashion so they are always secure, yet immediately accessible and producible, even in the most distressful and direst of situations.

Electronic documents are easily created, captured, transmitted, and stored securely and permanently based on your legal retention requirements.  Automatic audit trails will track each user’s activity and every document that resides on the system, which provides unparalleled document control that paper -- quite simply -- just cannot match.  Clearly, organizations continuing to hedge their bets by not using an electronic document management platform will have an uphill battle when it’s time to organize critical in formation so that it complies properly with all the applicable laws.

Learn more information on how easily and affordably your organization can mitigate these three significant business risks with online document management.

Top 3 Business Drivers for Document Management Software Adoption

The advantages of using document management software are numerous and well-known, but for many organizations it’s not so much the decision to adopt this type of web-based technology, but setting priorities for use once it’s been implemented and deployed.

According to recent survey of organizations conducted by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), the top three business drivers when considering document management software projects and priorities are the following: 

• Improving Efficiency

• Optimizing Business Processes

• Maintaining Compliance

Encompassing all four “C”s of ECM overall (cost, compliance, customer service and collaboration), these top drivers just happen to coincide with the most immediate and longest lasting advantages of an online document and records management solution.

Improving Efficiency

Online document management not only means the end to lost, misplaced, or misfiled documents, it saves incredible amounts of time that might otherwise be lost performing mundane or repetitive tasks.

Consider that it takes an average of four minutes to retrieve and re-file paper documents if the person knows the exact location of the document. Assuming a staff person files and/or retrieves 100 documents daily, that employee would spend over 1,600 hours a year just on filing. That represents over 75% lost productivity time!

In contrast, document management software enables files to be instantly and securely captured, shared, stored, and retrieved. 

Documents are indexed and filed electronically and stored centrally so every authorized user has access to them through an Internet connection, no matter where they are located. With Text Search and the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) features, retrieving documents is as quick and easy as a Google search so employees no longer have to go searching through dusty bankers’ boxes or file cabinets to find a file.

Optimizing Business Processes

Most web-based document management systems have some type of built in workflow capabilities to help streamline business processes by eliminating repetitive manual tasks and freeing up staff for more important activities. With rules-based workflow, you can create and automate business processes to coordinate between people, applications, and services. Documents can be routed, reviewed and approved quickly and seamlessly.  You can even integrate your document management system with back office applications for even more efficiency.

Automated workflows enable you to define tasks for a department or for business processes that cross various departments while enabling greater collaboration across multiple users, even in geographically dispersed locations. Notifications can be created for pending or new tasks. Collaboration with colleagues is simplified through notes and messages that flow automatically with individual documents or processes.

Maintaining Compliance

Audits are a daunting reality for any organization. Today businesses are making considerable modifications to their IT systems and internal processes to comply with federal regulations and mandates such as Sarbanes-Oxley Act, OSHA, and SEC.  Online document management systems make this easier with built-in audit trails that provide access histories and transactions for each document. 

Some solutions make records management more convenient as well by integrating with the online document management application, thereby allowing users to set retention parameters for relevant files and documents. Online document management is an outstanding way to better prepare your organization for audits and protect it against litigation, thereby eliminating the potential for fines and penalties.

Online Document Management and Workflow - June 2011 Newsletter Available Now!

Learn how Non-governmental organizations prosper from document management and workflow process optimization.

We've also got the top 3 business drivers for adoption of document management software, customer success stories, insightful whitepapers, and more!

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