Document Management: Maximizing the Benefits of Technology

The benefits of managing documents and records electronically are many, and they are also fairly well known.

The benefits of Electronic Document Management can include:

• Speed of search and retrieval.  Electronic documents can be located in seconds compared to days or weeks involved in retrieving paper documents from an archived storage location.
• Storage requirements.  A huge advantage of electronic documents is the smaller amount of space required to store and manage documents.  The information from roomfuls of physical documents can be stored on a disk that you can hold in your hand.
• Better and easier document distribution.
• Disaster recover and backups.  Replication of electronic document information using backups is fast and affordable.  Replication of large amounts of physical documents is generally not cost effective or practical.
• Accuracy of search/findability.   Both physical and electronic documents can be accidentally misfiled.  Misfiled documents in the physical world can be the equivalent of lost documents because of the length of time and expense that may need to be spent to ultimately recover them.  Electronic search can easily be configured to search across organizational hierarchies, making it easier to find documents that may have been inappropriately classified or filed.
• Collaboration.  Electronic documents make distribution and collaboration of information easy.

The benefits of adopting an electronic document management solution really make the technology a ‘no brainer’.  But before jumping into the technology too quickly, it’s important to first do careful planning.  And you don’t have to do all that work on your own.  Typically, vendors that specialize in document management solutions can guide and assist you in designing and building a solution for your organization that most cost effectively meets your needs.

Two important benefits from working with a document management solution provider include:

• Economies of Skill.  Vendors that specialize in document management are typically experts who know the technology inside and out and work with a variety of companies, skills that are hard to replicate within your organization.  It’s likely that the vendor has already created systems similar to your requirements for other organizations.
• Cheaper.  Experience and use of best practices lets document management vendors create solutions at a lower cost compared to what you’d be able to build yourself.