Document Management And Document Scanning Explained
HOW IT WORKS "THE iTUNES ANALOGY"
HOW IT WORKS "THE iTUNES ANALOGY"
Can you remember a time before iTunes when all your music was on CD? You could meticulously categorise this in alphabetical order or perhaps by genre. In no time at all though the order was "challenged" and perhaps CD's started to go missing or they weren't where you expected them to be. Then along came Apple with iTunes and everything became much easier.
With iTunes you can create a playlist of your favourite artists and your can browse in any order you like. Adding a new album is easy, you just drag it over and if you want to share your music with your other computers, you can click a setting and the computer in the kitchen can now play your music.
And back to business...
Document Management is a bit like iTunes for your everyday business information. Everything can be centralised in one place and finding a letter, delivery note or bank statement is so much easier if there is one electronic copy that can be viewed whenever you want to, within a few clicks...
Why does my business need Document Management?
Below we share just some of the major benefits but if we had to summarise in one line......It's all about
INCREASING PRODUCTIVITY & PROFIT.
Think about how you create and access your company paper records now? Chances are that like the majority of UK businesses, large and small, you create physical records in paper format and these will include all customer information, accounts payable, purchase ledger, payroll detail, delivery notes, internal correspondence, job cards, despatch details, invoices etc. In short a veritable mountain of paper every year will find a new home within your business and take up residence in hanging and lever arch files, archive boxes, drawers, cupboards and filing cabinets all around your office. The National Office of Statistics calculates that for every desk in UK businesses there are 3 filing cabinets keeping the desk company. That's good news for manufacturers of filing cabinets but definitely not good news for the efficiency of your business.
Now consider the alternatives and subsequent real benefits if all of those documents were electronically stored.
SPACE EFFICIENCY You could free up vital and expensive floor space once occupied by all this storage creating space for productive purposes i.e. revenue producing staff!
TIME SAVING No more time consuming trips to the filing cabinet only to find the file you want has been misfiled, is on someone else's desk or simply missing.
ACCESS Document Management offers significant improvements over conventional paper filing by allowing multiple users to access the same document(s) at the same time. This dramatically speeds up communication and subsequent decision making as all interested parties can view, discuss and implement actions simultaneously.
CONSISTENCY With paper based control and purely human input there is always the risk of documentation not being completed correctly and therefore failing to provide the data required for later reference. Document Management can be intelligently employed to enforce consistency and quality of information at the level you require. For example, no longer will consistency suffer as you add new employees or temporary staff to cover for sick or holidaying personnel. Different departments may also have different checking or approval processes and once defined a Document Management system will ensure they are followed.
PRODUCTIVITY & PROFIT One major and very real hidden cost that any paper reliant business faces is the amount of employee time taken to work with conventional paper filing systems. As an example lets take a 10 an hour employee and assume they take just 5 minutes to get up from their desk, walk to the filing area, find their chosen file, work with it, refile it and return to their desk. If that happens only 5 times a day then that equates to over 100 hours per annum - or put another way - just over 1000 per annum in wages - for just one employee. Multiply that realistically by the number of staff who access files every day in your business and the numbers are large enough to make any accountant cry! - Instant fix????
A document management system that allows staff to find and work with records but without ever leaving their desks can recoup those costs in an instant AND massively improve productivity.
SECURITY However you currently store your documents, electronically or otherwise, it's a good bet that you don't have adequate security or disaster recovery in place. Document Management allows you to create copies that can be backed up in a variety of ways, including off-site. This ensures that no unforeseen fire, flood, identity thief or even disgruntled employee can threaten the integrity of your most valuable data.
Document Management Software
Some business categories such as legal, accountancy and logistics as well as busy accounts departments, seem to get swamped by paper and handling all of the information coming in on a daily basis is hard work. A document management system is the efficient way of finding information faster. It's the equivalent of running iTunes for your paperwork - all of the information is in one place, its easy to search for specific documents and its much faster to categorise as well. We work with a great solution called FileDirector and have much more information on our main Click2Scan web site.
by: geoff shilton
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