Benefits of Document Management - 1

Recently I “tweeted” about 10 benefits of on demand, online document management. There are of course many more than just 10 benefits as long as the application is configured correctly so as to fulfil the business need and, that the customer is mentored during the initial stages of implementation in order to fine tune and adjust processes so that the full ROI on their investment can be achieved.  However I thought it would be good to develop the 10 benefits that I highlighted a little more, providing some additional detail so that businesses, whatever the size, can evaluate more fully the advantages of this technology.

The first mistake that a lot of people make is that document management is purely a form of archiving, it isn’t. Document management involves managing documents and their content through their entire life cycle, from creation and processing through to storage, archiving and destruction. That is why the name has changed over the years and is now referred to as Enterprise Content Management or ECM. An online document management or ECM system is accessed via the internet and stores documents in many different formats, a scanned image, a word document, an excel spreadsheet, a PDF document in fact any document in any format can be indexed and stored. Classifying documents correctly means that once stored, they can be searched on and retrieved accurately and quickly (more about this later), which brings us to the first benefit: Reclaim office Space and reduce paper files.

Office space is an expensive commodity. In the past I have spoken to clients that have gone through the pain of looking for larger premises just so that they can have room to store more files that they need access to on a daily basis. On one occasion I spoke to a customer that was using their borad room to store files. It meant that when they wanted to have a meeting, they had to hire and travel to another venue. Sounds ridiculous doesn’t it, but this highlights the fact that many of our processes are still paper driven. However if you could reclaim that office space and use it for what your business does best then surely that will result in massive savings and increased profitability.