3 Great Reasons to Use a Full Featured Document Management System
Have you noticed an increase in the number of advertisements for simple online document management software?
Marketed as an easy and cost-effective way to reduce paper while you organize and store paper files; these systems have become extremely affordable for small businesses. But if your company is using online document management solely as a way to reduce paper, or store your files in the cloud, then you’re missing the big picture.
Today’s technology has progressed light years beyond simple front-end document capture, filing, and storage. True document management systems feature structured document indexing, version control, rules-based workflow, integration, records retention compliance and business process management (BPM) tools that significantly increase your organization’s productivity and efficiency and provide an immediate return on investment.
By embracing this technology that structures document indexing and storage while striving to automate more of your workflow processes, you can better leverage your document management system to maximize your organization’s overall IT and business process investments.
The bottom line is, in today’s competitive global economy, you can’t afford NOT to automate. Three areas in particular can yield a tremendous return on investment from automated business processes and workflows.
1. Customer Service
Many organizations believe that because they are reducing the use of paper, they’ve taken the entire online document management system as far as they can. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If customer records are available electronically, and you can access them in seconds, customer service is immediate and you’ll see great improvements in customer satisfaction.
2. Back Office Operations
Your back office functions and processes are the engine of your business, so automating as many of them as you can makes good business sense. Human Resources are a great example of processes that should be automated. Using collaboration and messaging functionality with workflow can enable you to streamline HR processes including interviewing, hiring and termination.
Employee résumés, sick leave, PTO requests, salary increases, performance reviews, disciplinary action and the like, can all be instantly captured, stored, retrieved, and collaborated upon with ease. Other back office operations such as purchasing, accounts payable, accounts receivable and other paper-intensive functions can also be fully automated; allocating staff to other areas of the business that provide a value-add.
3. Risk Management
Whether it’s HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, FOIA, SEC, NASD, The Patriot Act or the dozens of other state, federal or industry regulations, some sort of risk management responsibilities impact your business. With online document management, highly confidential and private customer or business information is protected at all times, even when sharing and storing millions of documents. Customer and staff records will never be lost, misplaced, or fall into the wrong hands.
If your organization faces an e-discovery situation, the requested records can be accessed and presented immediately. In addition, using online document management to automate stringent records retention and disposition requirements will mitigate the risk involved with maintaining them manually.
Maintaining records beyond their retention period puts your company at risk. Conversely, if you destroy records prematurely, you run the risk of non-compliance which in itself has expensive monetary penalties.
By taking advantage of records retention functionality to automate your retention schedules, you cost-effectively alleviate the potential for human error which could cost you dearly.