Benefits of Document Management for Digital Growth
Benefits of Document Management for Digital Growth
A simple change to the way you manage your documents can offer your organization a competitive edge in your industry. Efficient document management encourages growth – especially in the digital realm.
Traditional document management systems involve complex steps for the capture, indexing, storage, and communication of documents and the data they contain. These processes consume time and introduce the possibility of human error into the document lifecycle.
As organizations deal with ever-increasing amounts of data, the document lifecycle becomes more complex. The opportunity cost of manual document management and the retroactive correction of data entry errors start to drag down overall productivity.
Document management represents a long-term investment in your employees’ ability to deliver relevant content to business workflow applications. Enterprise document management combines both a strategic framework and a technical architecture to increase the efficiency of collaborative processes.
Additional benefits of document management include remote access capability and increased data security. All of these factors contribute to digital growth.
Benefits of Document Management by Core Functionalities
Document management is not a one-dimensional solution to a single business problem. It is a multi-faceted suite of solutions that generates synergies between different core processes.
1. Document Capture
The first step of the document lifecycle is receipt and capture. In traditional business environments, documents arrive in paper format, are scanned into a central database, and then further processed on paper. Updated versions of the document make their way to the database as employees process and create them.
This relies heavily on accurate data entry, and makes inefficient use of company resources, particularly print resources. One of the primary benefits of document management is the ability to capture documents once – using optical character recognition (OCR) to skip time-consuming data entry – and then migrate processing transactions to the digital domain.
2. Document Indexing
Effective records management is critical to ensuring legal and regulatory compliance in any industry. Whether your business needs to accommodate industry-specific compliance standards or general standards such as ISO 15489, you need a robust document management platform in place to streamline the process.
Enterprise document management platforms allow for automatic indexing. This allows employees to find documents using a broad range of metadata and tags. OCR technology allows for the creation of automatic indexes generated by a potentially unlimited number of terms with minimal human intervention.
3. Document Storage
Every organization in operation today needs to take great care when selecting the file format it chooses for document storage. Whether storing documents on a cloud-based server or an on-premises one, the portability and compatibility of document formats are critical. If your business has a volume of files that multiple people need access to, it’s time to consider a different server technology.
Professional document management platforms address these issues by allowing for automatic conversion between popular file types. TIFF files that contain high-resolution images of original documents can easily be converted to JPEG files for quick transfer, or PDF for visual clarity and text-editability.
4. Enhanced Accessibility and Security
Today’s knowledge workers are increasingly relying on mobile technology to send and receive the data they need on a daily basis. The ability to access documents through a cloud-based document management server can result in significant reduction in the average time it takes to process documents.
But alongside improvements in accessibility must come improvements in security. Document management platforms allow for advanced authorization mechanisms, including authentication and systems administrator oversight.
Why Organizations Are Deploying Document Management Platforms
Implementing a document management solution now is a decision that generates long-term value throughout the entire organization. While platforms of this type have been on the market for years, recent technological and infrastructural advances in IT make a case for growth in this field.
In fact, AmeriResearch predicts that the value of the global document management market will grow sevenfold by 2024, reaching $49 billion in global revenue. Cost of ownership is dropping while companies experience an increasing need to comply with digital document regulation and to achieve streamlined end-point access that these solutions provide.
But it is necessary to make a key distinction between professional document management platforms that are powerful and easy to use and those that are not. If a platform does not encourage everyday employees to use it, they will find reasons to avoid it, undermining its efficiency. To truly enjoy the benefits of document management, your company must deploy one designed for ease of use.
Are you ready to deploy a document management solution that will streamline your business processes? Talk to a Smile specialist about document management solutions you can implement today!
