When you implement new technology, your chosen software or application should improve operational efficiencies, increase employee productivity and cut costs across your entire company.
In the realm of document management software, sharing critical documents throughout your organization results in speed efficiencies as well as freeing up employees to focus on higher-impact tasks.
But, the software you choose is critical to how quickly you begin to see a return on investment.
Here are five essential features of document management software that save time and cut costs soon after implementation.
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Usability: The success of document management revolves around the software’s ease of use. Usability is critical to team support and rapid staff acceptance. Graphic interfaces for often-used business functions – for example, document search and retrieval – should be easy to use and adaptable to the way employees already work.
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Retrieval And Indexing: The larger your business gets, the more documents you have to search through in order to locate critical information to complete tasks. Standard search functions prevent your employees from focusing on closing sales instead of searching for documents. Multiple methods of categorizing and indexing information pave the way for the kind of searching and sorting that saves time and allows you to focus on improving your bottom line.
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Distribution: Putting the right documents in the hands of the right people – while simultaneously allowing multiple users to access the same document at the same time – increases productivity by optimizing resources. Integration with print, fax, email and your company’s intranet streamlines document sharing and speeds up approval and sign-off processes.
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Workflow Automation: Businesses experience immediate benefits from being able to streamline processes and eliminate bottlenecks by automatically routing documents to the right people. The ability to generate return receipts and responses enables fast follow-up procedures. Critical to true time-saving workflow automation is the ability to institute rules and exceptions when necessary.
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Security: A comprehensive approach to document management security involves authentication, authorization, disaster recovery and audit trail reporting. It’s essential that your system administrator have the ability to balance security through access and feature rights for users – at the group and individual level – and file types, from folders to documents.
While most document management systems provide basic scanning, retrieval and display functions, implementing document management inside your organization – whether you have a small business, medium-sized company or enterprise organization – requires more than the basics.
The amount of users, office locations and document types all impact the type of software as well as speed of implementation.
Learn more about how to quickly and efficiently implement a document management system inside your organization.
Learn more about document management.
