If you’re an enterprise company, you may have come to the point where you realize the need to change how your employees handle documents inside your organization and how your customers receive documents outside of it.
To fully experience the benefits of a true enterprise document management solution – saving time, enabling automation, increasing productivity, enhancing profitability, expanding communication and streamlining collaboration – you must lock down your document types, and ensure your chosen software is suited to help you store and manage them.
Determine Key Enterprise Content Types
To judge the effectiveness of an enterprise content management system, you need to ask yourself: “Can the software handle the variety of documents inside my organization?” The first step is to take inventory of the kinds of documents your organization has, and then identify what kinds of documents you use the most.
Below are basic categories of enterprise documents and a few examples of each:
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Business Level: Sales proposals, technical documents, employee training materials, legal contracts, product catalogs, etc.
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Transactional: Sales orders, tax returns, loan agreements, invoices, customer help desk tickets, etc.
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Persuasive: Press releases, websites, media files, etc.
Use Document Types To Drive Document Management Features
The challenge with document management is that your enterprise may have many types of documents. So, the real secret of choosing document management software that does everything you need it to is in using document types to guide your software selection.
In some situations, documents may be structured or unstructured. They may be paper-based or digital.
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If your enterprise handles a lot of paper-based documents, and those documents are critical to how you do business, you need the ability to electronically upload these documents to your system through document scanning and imaging features.
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If you rely heavily on technology or handle website management for a variety of clients, then web content management needs to be a critical component of your enterprise content management software.
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If your company thrives on collaboration through unstructured documents like spreadsheets, emails and drawings, your content management system needs to be able to index unstructured information while enabling collaboration.
Base Your Document Management Strategy In Key Business Decisions
The most important aspect of enterprise document management is breaking down the silos of information and saving your employees time finding the information they need to drive processes and push projects forward.
Critical, confidential and widely used, enterprise documents require efficient handling and management to truly save you time and generate a return on your investment.
Learn more about how enterprise document management software improves organizational efficiencies by downloading 9 Ways To Reduce Costs In Your Accounting Processes With Enterprise Content Management.
