Document management via document management system (DMS) and enterprise content management (ECM) solutions can have
breakthrough business results, and it’s more relevant than ever amidst growing cybersecurity threats. No matter what your industry, electronic and paper documents—forms, contracts, invoices, etc.—are a big part of doing business. Managing the flow of your business information from multiple sources can be challenging.
But navigating document management and staying agile doesn’t have to be a heavy lift for your organization with the right best practices in play. Implementing the correct approach, ECM, and DMS enables your document management to promote greater productivity and efficiency. This looks different for every organization.
Depending on your business protocol and industry, you can reap major benefits from an enterprise content management solution and a dynamic document management system. These capture, store, and retrieve electronic and paper documents to help you meet regulatory requirements and discover added value.
What are the benefits of an Electronic Document Management System?
While businesses are moving to the cloud and going digital, depending on your industry and bandwidth, you could still have an overwhelming amount of paper documents. Investing in an electronic document management system can help. That’s because a DMS enables you to scale critical business processes while streamlining workflows across your organization. And the benefits don’t stop with major productivity gains.
Document management benefits support your business in a meaningful way. Let’s cover some of the main advantages:
1. Stay in Compliance with Document Management.
If you’re in healthcare, finance, education, or a highly-regulated government agency, compliance requirements for your business documents are anything but easy. Staying in compliance can help your business avoid legal and penalty fines, law suits, revoked licenses, and in worst case scenarios, criminal charges and liability. With federal and state regulatory regulations including HIPAA compliance you must adhere to strict security and privacy guidelines. That’s where DMS comes into play.
Document management helps you shield your business against drastic financial, legal, and reputational damage by proactively mitigating non-compliance risks. You immediately minimize the risk of missteps and compliance violations with a Document Management System and Enterprise Content Management system automating more business processes to promote greater precision. Automated document scanning and data capture and extraction streamline processes while bolstering accuracy. So, moving forward your new documents can be easily classified and stored.
2. Reduce storage space with a DMS.
In the age of big data, the value of data is increasing, and so it the cost of storage. Your paper document scans are no exception. But having a software-based DMS can help you eliminate the risk and cost associated with storing physical documents onsite. A document management system isn’t just a nice to have, it eliminates the risk of having valuable documents destroyed in a fire or a natural disaster, or even just misplaced among other stacks of papers.
Your organization can stash the minority of hard copies that you require in secured locations without taking up a ton of office space. Meanwhile, with an electronic document management system you can cut through the clutter to better allocate office space and resources. Digital documents are easier to locate and share on the fly. Next let’s break down easier document retrieval.
3. Simplify document retrieval.
Streamlining document retrieval saves your organization and team members valuable time. In fact, Forbes reported that the average office worker spends almost half of their day scouring their offices for print documents. Businesses already spend $220 in labor for document reproduction and $120 to locate critical business documents that are missing in action. While these document management costs might seem insignificant, they quickly add up, and it’s hard to calculate exactly how much these obstacles cost your business in productivity.
Document management systems save time and eliminate unnecessary chaos that impact your bottom line, employee satisfaction, and your customer experience. Depending on which DMS you leverage you can retrieve files in seconds with a quick key word or phrase search. Streamlined document management integrated with business applications empowers fast access to essential business details.
Document management also supports hybrid and remote work environments, multiple office locations, and global enterprises with easy, instant remote access to documents. That means you can access the documents you need when you need them—wherever you are.
That fast access to content enables a higher level of collaboration with your advanced document management system. All of your documents, captured across various sources, can be accessed from authorized users at any location. With electronic imaging your team members can efficiently and effortlessly store and share documents over your network to promote better and faster communications between colleagues and teams and keep initiatives moving forward. With DMS, your business leaders gain deeper visibility across business processes with the ability to enable more effective workflow monitoring. It’s simple to prevent unauthorized access while enabling quick, convenient access for approved viewers. Let’s explore more security benefits.
4. Improve document security and Backup and Disaster Recovery.
Protecting your sensitive business data is important for every organization—no matter what size. With DMS you have total control and access with sensitive documents. Document management also enables you to ensure details are secure and only viewable by business members or departments necessary—setting the appropriate user permissions for teams and business members at a directory level. These permissions immediately help you eliminate business liabilities.
When you have a DMS you also have a constant, real-time record of when your documents were last accessed and by whom and if and how they might have been updated. This means you have a full user log of every business member who has viewed any file on your network. With these managed documents you enjoy greater visibility and traceability with the ability to enable automated alerts for specific business members anytime a document is accessed and or modified.
Document management solutions should also include a data backup and disaster recovery plan to prevent document loss and boost your business resilience. With a digital archive of all of your business documents, your files and your business are protected from any physical disruption.
Due to the highly traceable nature of DMS documents, you can also track files using a virtually endless range of criteria. With document tracking you also reduce the odds of having any of your business documents lost or filed incorrectly after they’re viewed.
5. Make significant productivity gains.
Implementing a document management system eliminates the amount of time spent hunting for files and makes sharing simple and immediate. These capabilities help your business tap into a new level of productivity. Quick, convenient document retrieval and sharing also support a better customer experience and your employee morale across all business locations. In addition, your business is able to:
- Gain agility with greater flexibility in how you manage and share documents and fewer business silos.
- Create a competitive edge by empowering greater productivity and ROI across your business.
- Alleviate risk and liabilities that come along with having physical files containing sensitive business data.
- Unleash a better customer experience with greater speed and accuracy.
- Increase employee morale and retention with easier access to the details they need.
Take these benefits further with a Document Management Solution built for your business.
A custom-built DMS helps you gain even greater agility with the ability to align your document management approach with your existing tech stack and business processes. Implementing an effective ECM backed by a robust DMS helps your business remain relevant and competitive. With a document management system you already reduce room for loss or errors and eliminate silos across your organization.
You can achieve the greatest possible business performance with a custom document management approach and system that supports your specific customer and business needs. A custom DMS enables you to carve your document management strategy around your industry best practices and business requirements and regulations.
You can partner with an imaging and managed services provider (MSP) to tailor your DMS and ECM to your unique goals and needs.
Document Management doesn’t have to be difficult. Fruth Group Imaging experts can help.
Unleash a new level of document management, traceability, and control. Connect with one of Fruth Group’s imaging experts to assess your business needs, and how you can benefit from the right DMS. Fruth Group has over two decades of experience in Managed Print Services and Document Management. It’s easy to get left behind in today’s disruptive digital age, act now.
