Electronic Document Management

Electronic Document Management has been widely accepted as the practice of creating and storing documents. What lacks common acceptance is the need to retrieve, archive and sort documents as per requirements.
With real estate costs climbing feverishly, and businesses process becoming more and more complex and demanding, the need to implement an integrated electronic document management system is growing by the day. Realizing this opportunity, several global software vendors have come up with their document management products to facilitate this process and more and more organizations are implementing this system in today's world.

It is important to understand what exactly electronic document management refers to and why is it so important to organizations, small or big.
Electronic Document Management System refers to a system whereby documents are created, modified, stored, distributed, secured and retrieved with the help of software tools.

An organization must ponder several times and answer several questions before it goes about implementing a document management system. Some of the questions that must be asked can be:-
(1) Are your documents uniformly marked and stored for "finger-pointed" retrieval.
(2) Can you easily gather related documents that are physically distributed at different places.
(3) Can your personnel easily locate documents created or modified by others within the organization, regardless of the format and method of creation of the documents.
(4) How long does it take to locate the desired bunch of documents.
(5) Can you find a specific type of similar documents over a date range quickly and effectively.
(6) Can you track back the person responsible for handling any particular document.

Answering the above questions can easily help you take a decision. Also, to arrive at a conclusion, one must keep in mind the following characteristics of a suitable document management system.
(a) Should convert your office into a paper-less office by electronically keeping track of all documents.
(b) Should seamlessly integrate with your existing manual document management methods.
(c) Should help your business grow faster by ensuring fast and accurate availability of information.
(d) Should help you analyze the efficiency of co-workers by keeping track of documentation work allotted to them.

1 comment :

docs2digital said...

Hi, BRILLIANT writing. I sit here at my desk watching companies resist this type of technology on an hourly basis. The Real Estate Industry has been very slow to embrace yet they deal in as much if not more critical documents as a large legal firm. Another issue to cover here is security. Just how secure are those docs that are stored in a file cabinet. Even if you scan and save to disc anybody can retrieve and remove/change etc.

Yes, I do have a small company that delivers DMS technology www.docs2digital.com . However this reply is simply to get companies to realize the benefits and quit putting themselves at risk in this day and age of theft. Below is a quick test I offer those considering this technology and it does not hit on security issues. With the cost going down and ROI's going up there is very little reason anymore to run a paper based system. Heres the quick test:
STEP 1: Using a watch time how long it takes to retrieve, copy and distribute then refile a file from approx one year ago. Now guestimate how many file are retrieved in one day. Take that number and multiply it by the number of working days per year for your company. Take that number and multiply it by a burdened labor rate for that position. The dollar amount you reach is a portion of the cost your paper based system is costing you. This basic formula does not include the cost of making copies, lost or misplaced files.

STEP 2: In a word document or similar, type the name of the file you retrieved in step one. Using the same formula above compare the numbers.

Step 3: Office Real Estate, a standard four drawer upright filing cabinet takes up (conservative) 2 1/2 sq ft of space. add up the number of cabinets and divide that into what you are paying square foot wise for your office space. Thats what its costing you to store your paper. Could that space be put to better more profitable use?

Thanks.

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