Why is Electronic Document Management System important?

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Today businesses have to deal with extensive usage of documents on a day-to-day basis. 

These documents can be related to contracts, invoices, proposals, documentation, company guidelines, and the list is endless. The functioning of every business depends on these documents. 

In most small businesses, there is no uniform way to create, index, and store documents.

That is why, in this digital world, companies need a well-organized Document management system to save time and effort. 

What is an Electronic Document Management System?

For businesses, the required information must reach the right people at the right time.

A Document Management System (DMS) is an automated system that stores, tracks, and retrieves digital documents in various formats. 

This System helps organize different documents in various folders, streamlining the organizational workflow and helping in the smooth functioning of day-to-day tasks. 

What are the challenges businesses face while storing Documents?

Paper Documents:

1. Gets lost easily.
2. Needs file folder to Index.
3. Not easily retrievable offsite.
4. Gets destroyed with aging.

Today, many businesses thrive by scanning paper documents and OCR to electronic form.

Emails:

1. Many copies float around as people Cc them to everyone.
2. Mixes with lots of junk mails.
3. Company emails usually go to a person and not easily shared unless Cc’d.

Today many CRM systems integrate with emails so that CSR can see all the communication happening with the customers.

Excel, Spreadsheets, and Word documents:

1. Usually not indexed so hard to find.
2. Stays on one computer and hard to find when needed offsite.

What is the purpose of a Document Management System?

1. To store all the organizational documents in one place. 
2. Organizing documents efficiently in proper folders.
3. Most DMS have a centralized stored database, which all the organization members can easily access.  
4. To make the search and retrieval of documents an easy process. 
5. Reduces the cost and space of maintaining paper documents.
6. Avoid losing any documents.
7. Web-based system makes it easy to update documents from time to time.
8. Providing a layer of security.
9. Power to control access to confidential documents.
10. Digitization and regular back-up of documents will make them permanent and convenient to manage.

Benefits of using a Document management system:

• Security:

Organizational documents contain critical and confidential data. It is crucial to keep this data protected and provide better access controls.

A Document management system will protect sensitive data and have control over giving access to view and modify documents to individuals or teams.

Few document management systems can track edits made to the documents, which always ensures that the latest document is available.  

• Quick access:

Workers spend nearly 18 minutes searching for a document, while 86% of employees say they cannot find desired documents when needed.

This excessive hunting for documents will hamper productivity and waste time and effort.

Adopting an efficient system makes searching and retrieving documents a smooth process. Documents can be easily searched through folders or by using keywords or phrases.  

• Data backup:

In case of disaster, there is always a chance of documents getting lost or misplaced. It is nearly impossible to recover the crucial documents.

Document management systems usually have a data backup plan, which makes it easy to recover documents in case of theft or other issues.  

• Collaboration:

Centralized and quick access to documents from multiple locations will improve team collaboration.

Additionally, sharing documents via email or a customer portal network is also easy.  

• Remote work:

Once the documents are stored in the centralized database system, it becomes easy for the employees to access them. These documents can be accessed through desktop, laptop, or mobile devices.

Even remote employees or employees traveling don’t have to wait for their co-workers to scan and email the required documents. These documents can be accessed 24/7 from any location.  

• Accuracy:

Digitally stored documents provide a high rate of accuracy. Most systems can download and edit documents, ensuring team access to updated documents. 

• Reduced storage cost:

As per the statistics, 80% of information is still paper-based in most organizations. Storing paper-based documents increases storage space cost and the cost of maintaining them.

Also, companies spend $20 on average to store paper documents. Storing hard copies of documents in an efficient system will be less expensive and easily accessible. 

How does the OfficeClip Document Management System help?

• Folders:

With OfficeClip Documents create different types of folders for all kinds of documents. After creating the folders, it becomes easy to store and search the required documents in the requisite folders.

• Upload:

Users can upload all types of files and documents. In addition, it can also bulk upload zip files.

• Search:

The powerful search feature will allow you to search for documents using text, file name, file type, size, date created, keywords, etc.

• Dropsite:

This feature enables the extranet users or your customers to upload documents into OfficeClip.

• Permissions:

The Administrator can set permissions for specific folders or documents to restrict access to confidential documents.

• Share Documents:

Users can share documents via a web-link(public access) or secured link(secured access) with customer portal users.

• Storage:

Up to 10 GB of free storage is available for storing all the organizational documents. You can get extra storage at a small fee.

Conclusion:

OfficeClip’s document management system is the right solution that will help you to store all your important and confidential documents.

With easy and faster access to information, it will help to increase the speed of workflow. This Document Management System will bring many benefits to your organization and help to fasten your business processes and increase efficiency.

Sign up now to know how OfficeClip’s document management system working for you.

Photo Courtesy: Andrea Piacquadio Creative Common Attribution

 

Note: This blog was originally published in June 2020, and has been updated.