Going Paperless

Is Paperless The Way To Go For Our Organizations?

Document management and the way our organization handles the process, is becoming a big concern for us. Why is that? Is it the fact that knowledge not put in some type of retrievable form is lost when turnover occurs? Is it the fact that businesses do not have the luxury of being able to spend quality time with employees to ensure procedures are followed to the expectations of management? Are external processes consistently changing and staff can’t keep up with it? Could it even be simpler than all this, and businesses are trying to improve productivity time and save some costs on storage and office space? All of these are valid reasons that the “Paperless Office” is becoming of interest to all types of organizations. 

Many document management companies discuss the savings of time and storage space, but the fact of the matter is that organizations will be placing themselves in jeopardy without the use of proper document management. That seems extremely strong language when referring to this topic, but let’s stop and look at the situation. How many businesses that we might be aware of intimately have proper documentation? Lack of documents will cause bottlenecks, and misunderstanding of the process. Documents in a business process are a means to measure, manage and improve processes. Workflow and routing help organizations move information on a timely basis. Knowledge and the sharing of information must come in the form of documentation as organizations cannot afford turnover without a knowledge structure in place. People are the creator of the facts and the documentation to manage the process. Processes define the organization’s framework and count on the documentation for defining, auditing and startup. Change occurs in all organizations, and documents allow for change to take place. This facilitates the change by a documentation view.

 

Document management system

A document management system (DMS) is a computer system (or set of computer programs) used to track and store electronic documents and/or images of paper documents. It is usually also capable of keeping track of the different versions modified by different users (history tracking). The term has some overlap with the concepts of content management systems. It is often viewed as a component of enterprise content management (ECM) systems and related to digital asset management, document imaging, workflow systems and records management systems. (From Wikipedia)

How is a Document Management System Used?

A document management system can be used to capture and organize all of these documents into easy-to-find electronic documents. The paper documents could have been scanned into the document management system. The electronic records could be either stored in the system or pointed to from another system. A document management system has the power to tie these documents together.

The documents could be indexed by department, vendor, purchase order number or any other concept that makes business sense to your organization. Unlike folders in a file cabinet, document management systems store documents in electronic folders that can be indexed by multiple pieces of information. This gives users the ability to search and retrieve documents based upon different criteria.

With a document management system, gone are the days of lost documents because they are all in one secure central electronic repository. Also gone are the days of wasted time because multiple people are retrieving documents from various locations and multiple file cabinets. With a document management system, the documents are immediately retrieved for the person looking for information. This not only makes them more productive for that one task, it shifts the focus from the document retrieval to solving the original issue.

Above, we introduced two important concepts, document capture and indexing. Both of these deserve a more detailed discussion. In the next section we will discuss document capture.

Overview of What Document Management Software Can Do

·     The document management software must securely hold all documents, and any file type.

·     Scan directly into the document management software with OCR and automatic indexing - Built into the DMS solutions.

·         Audit log of all activity by users.

·         Check in and out documents for remote processing.

·         Retention date settings and purging routines.

·         Archive routines.

·         Version management for generations of documents.

·         Remote access via Web, Terminal Services, VPN….

·         One touch search routine.

·         Unlimited Repository, folders, and documents.

·         Multiple file rooms for additional security.

·         Multiple layers of security

·         Route any document or file directly from any Windows application.

·         Route Faxes and email directly to the system without staff intervention.