Document Management System Success

From Analysis Through Adoption

Understanding the basics of a document management system is the start to ensuring that your implementation is successful. It will enable you to participate as part of the team with your chosen document management vendor.

Document Management Analysis

The one key ingredient to a successful document management system is upfront planning of your system. This is where your document management vendor can make a difference. In your career, you might implement one or two document management systems. Your vendor has implemented hundreds or thousands across all different types of organizations and satisfying all different types of business requirements. This is a team effort involving both your team and the vendor’s team. Without involvement and buy in from your management and staff, a document management implementation cannot be successful.

Getting buy in from management tends to be easy. The benefits of implementing a document management system are quantifiable and either drop right to the bottom line or improve efficiency in such a way as to be almost startling.

Document Management Adoption

Getting buy in from staff requires that they be included in the design process. The staff, typically not the management, knows how documents are used and or routed. Management may know want they want, and while this is important for design, knowing your current state is essential to moving forward. With this knowledge the system can be designed to meet the needs of the entire organization and takes into account the current processes.

This implementation process provides a great opportunity to improve your current business processes. Typically when exploring how an organization functions you hear statements such as “We’ve always done it this way” without any real explanation or reason. There are dozens of key phrases that an experienced vendor will hear that signal areas of opportunities within the business for improvement.

Success requires that you pick the right document management vendor; one who actively listens for these clues. Success also requires the buy in from the organization. With these two success factors in place, your document management system will exceed your expectations.

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