7 Reasons Your Company Needs End-to-End Document Management

If you are in an organization, you create documents. Whether they are employee records, forms filled by customers, product plans, strategy memos, legal records, or even minutes of meetings. Those documents are valuable to someone somewhere in your organization – be it in terms of decision making or daily operations. But without a secure document management system in place, that value is often diminished due to damage or loss. This is especially true as the organization grows. Business Dictionary defines Document Management System (DMS) as, An electronic system designed to organize and manage documents. These documents are usually organized with software, which provides the user with the ability to access, modify, and centrally store the documents. Document management systems handle tedious tasks such as archiving, distribution, and creation of documents.

An end-to-end document management solution , such as one provided by SoftAge, includes a sophisticated DMS, along with value added services such as collection of the document from the company’s local offices/distribution points, verification of the document according to company parameters and warehousing of the physical document.

Here are 7 reasons your company should adopt an End-to-End Document Management System:

1. Saves Money Both Directly and Indirectly: The time and money spent searching for paper files is significant. A study conducted by International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that an enterprise with 1,000 workers wastes between $2.5 and $3.5 million a year searching for important documents. In addition to this reduction in operational costs, storage costs are reduced because you don’t need to rent your own warehouses, you can simply scan and digitize everything or leverage off your DMS provider’s warehouse infrastructure. 
2.  Greater Speed of Document Retrieval: Not only is money wasted in document retrieval, by an extension, so is time. IDC uncovered that staff spends around 20% of their working hours searching for information in files, although they only ever find half of what they are looking for. A DMS ensures that documents are indexed in several different ways simultaneously, and archived systematically. This ensures that the digital copy and the physical document can be searched & retrieved within a few minutes.
3.  Controlled and Improved Document Distribution: A DMS acts as a centralizing force for all your information, ensuring control over document access and preserving intellectual capital & organizational knowledge. The locality of information is not locked away in the 'heads' of specific individuals who might leave, and can be easily shared across departments and physical locations, increasing the value of that information to the organization. This means that important operational data becomes portable and is easily accessible, whereas confidential information & sensitive documents are kept secure. An efficient DMS provider also ensures security for your documents through biometrics, state-of-art alarm systems and security personnel. 
4.  Reduce Scope of Human Error:  There is often time lost in a manual system due to human error. A user may have stored a document in the wrong place by accident, indexed incorrectly, forgotten what the document was named etc. According to IDC and a PWC study, in an average office, one in 20 documents is lost for good. Lost documents can be expensive and time-consuming to replace. When stored in a central repository, documents remain centrally archived while being viewed or used, so that none are misplaced.
5. Legal Benefits:  Organizations often find themselves dealing with legal proceedings. These might be small concerns such as fees & fines or larger disputes which involve court cases. Valid long-term records and documents are required and extremely helpful in such cases. Also, most industries have regulatory compliances and standards.  The risk of non-conformance leads to fines, license withdrawal, or in certain circumstances custodial sentences. An End-to-End DMS ensures that your organization is thoroughly prepared in such circumstances through a combination of systematically maintained records, security control, audit trails and archiving. 
6.  Improved customer service and satisfaction: Efficient Document Management means reduced response times and a more accurate response. More controlled processes mean that the time spent on 'manually' ensuring customer satisfaction is reduced, and the process becomes more efficient. Also, the turn around time in delivering your product or service to the customer reduces, as the document-based process becomes more efficient.
7. Increased Operational Efficiency: All of the above points imply or lead to increased operational efficiency. Also, using a DMS firm means that the organization can allocate resources to other core business activities. In addition to this, DMS has other operational benefits such as an improved cash flow. Increased productivity in accessing and processing invoices, debt collection and other "cash critical" business documents, ensures that the flow of cash can be controlled centrally and that all documentation required to make cash flow decisions can be accessed immediately