A little while ago, I created a post called the “8 ways to use technology to be more efficient“. In that post, I outlined some great places to focus your energy to begin making your business more efficient through the use of technology. That was followed by a description of potential for Paperwork Process Automation. Taking a little more time to explain the specific uses may really help to allow you to take steps in this direction.
photo credit: redjar
The second way that was described in the original post was document management. This is a topic that has a lot of opportunity and also a huge number of options for solutions that can help you.
What do you mean?
Document management solutions are really quite simple. They are typically an electronic data storage cabinet. Instead of having to store all of your paperwork onsite and have your employees access it by running to the filing cabinets, the document management solution stores all the documents and allows online retreival.
How does it help?
Document management solutions can help in many ways. Here are 4 big ways that the solutions help:
1. Backup of paperwork
The solution will make it much easier to make backups of the paperwork that you have retrieved. Doing this with paper documents is very cumbersome and many times just not economically feasible. If you have a document management solution and good backup solution, in most cases it will be pretty easy to backup all of the document repositories that exist for your business.
2. Storage space
With office space becoming more and more expensive, keeping the space necessary to simply store document low makes a lot of sense. By storing your data electronically, you will not have to have any more than you have to support your network and server equipment (and with a virtualized solution – no space is necessary). You can offset much of the costs of your document management solutions by being able make more efficient use of your office space.
3. Online retrieval
Online retrieval of documents provides a few great opportunities. First, it makes it very easy to allow your virtual employees to access your paperwork and documentation. This will significantly decrease the headache of working remotely. As has been described in quite a few posts on this blog, remote employees can make your business much more efficient.
Second, online retrieval allows for you to easily handle disaster recovery scenarios. Because everyone will be accessing the documents from an online repository it can easily exist in one or more remote locations. This makes disaster recovery significantly easier.
Third, it allows you the opportunity to provide online self-service portals for your clients. By creating a web site that allows your clients to log in a review the documentation that you have available you make it easier to provide copies of statements, invoices, late notices, etc. Also, they can see copies of their original documents for their review. This type of portal can significantly ease the volume of calls to your customer service people.
4. Search/indexing
Most document management solution allow document to indexed and in some case even index the entire document allowing for rapid searching. This is something that a paper based system can never provide. With solutions like this it makes it very easy to find documents in your repository that have certain phrasing or specific text in them. This can prove to save a significant amount of time if you ever have to find a document without knowing the exact document you are looking for.
Take a step
The first step to consider is reviewing some of the existing document management systems that exist on the market today. There are many available with a variety of options to meet your needs. You can start by looking at tools like Microsoft Sharepoint Online or Zoho.com. There are hundreds of other options available if you need more or different capabilities.
Are your documents stored electronically today? Why or why not?
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