9 Corporate Document Management Secrets Revealed

Even when company leaders realize there’s lots of room for process improvement, they may have misconceptions about what a corporate document management system would truly entail.

When you hear about electronic document management systems or enterprise content management, you might envision a complex, highly technical system that’s difficult for businesspeople to use. This is a common misunderstanding.

Many people also wrongly assume that a document management system would cost a lot of money, take a long time to set up, and probably require you to make disruptive changes in your IT infrastructure and established ways of doing business. As a result, too many organizations struggle along needlessly while their competitors surge ahead.

Here are nine surprising facts about corporate document management, from how much inefficient systems really cost to the process improvement that’s possible with digital document management:

1. Your employees probably waste much of their time shuffling paper: The average employee spends 30 to 40 percent of his or her time just trying to retrieve information that’s locked in document silos such as email accounts and filing cabinets, according to facts from IDC, others.
2. A paper-based office is a costly choice: If you start adding up what you’re paying for the supplies, shipping and postage along with the expense of buying and maintaining printers and copying machines, the total is a lot higher than you’d think.
3. Document management affects your core business functions: While the resources taken up by inefficient document management has an immediate impact on employee productivity and operating costs, it also affects your core business. How your business handles its document flow has the potential to either burden your business or differentiate you from the competition.
4. A digital workflow doesn’t require extensive training: In fact, a digital document workflow resembles your existing paper system, except it’s even more intuitive and simple to use. For example, when you stamp a digital document electronically, it looks the same as if you’d used a paper stamp. But with a digital document workflow, you could have the document automatically forwarded to the next person in the workflow instead of sitting in a paper outbox.
5. Finding any document should take seconds: In a digital document management system, documents are automatically scanned and indexed, resulting in powerful index search and full text search capabilities. Let’s say you’re trying to find information on a device you bought or sold 15 years ago. Just enter the serial number, and you’ll immediately pull up the invoice, packing slip and other relevant documents.
6. Integrating with existing systems is no problem: It’s possible to integrate powerful corporate document management within your current business infrastructure. In an accounting platform, for example, you could add a button that gives you immediate access to all accounting documents related to the content of your current screen.
7. Scanning physical documents is fast: These days, the speed of scanning allows you to create digital versions at a rate of 30 to 60 pages per minute.
8. Document management is for all document types: A good document management system is comprehensive, organizing not only paper documents but also digital files, such as email and Microsoft Office documents.
9. Digital workflows offer simplicity and speed: Rather than increasing complexity, a document management system makes it easy to streamline workflows, such as your invoice review and approval process, and automatically create audit trails that save countless hours down the road.

At many companies, there’s lots of room for process improvement in terms of how they handle documents. Now that you have these nine facts under your belt, there’s no reason to let misconceptions about corporate document management hold you back any longer.