The central objective of utilizing EDM is to make your overall business processes more efficient, and specifically to accelerate and properly secure the way you move documents across your office.
In the months before they toe the starting line, many runners and endurance athletes mistakenly obsess over one attribute through their training plan - speed. However, to maintain top efficiency in their movements and to keep these movements sharp as possible, agility - a combination of speed, control and coordination – is a critical part of everyday training.
Agility is also the key, big picture component to proficient document workflow. It's not just how fast you operate - it's how coordinated and efficient those efforts are.
Organizations often identify document management as simply “scanning paper into a digital form.” Digital conversion is only one component – and hardly the overarching intention – behind employing Electronic Document Management (EDM).
The central objective of utilizing Document Management is to make your overall business processes more efficient, and specifically to accelerate and properly secure the way you move documents across your office. As the volume and complexity of business critical data increases over time, your organization can be fully agile in the way it accesses and manages it.
Here’s 5 workflow scenarios for your organization to consider:
1. Customer Resolution at your Fingertips:
A customer calls in with a question regarding an invoice. You hang up, run pull that invoice and call the customer back. Or a client needs a copy of the work order recently completed. In both cases, with EDM one call resolution is a reality. Pull up the necessary file and email it before hanging up with the customer.
2. Accelerate Your Approval Process:
The CEO can enjoy a Friday afternoon on the course without the documents piling on the corner of the desk pending approval. Document Management allows he or she to approve accordingly from his iPad or other mobile device on the 17th tee box.
3. Docs Present and Accounted For:
It’s simple really. No more documents lying on the fax machine or gathering dust atop desks. Depending on your industry, this could be more of a formality. However, consider HIPAA and other regulations that specifically tell companies how documents are to be safeguarded.
4. Attention to Retention:
Does your office have a Document Retention Policy? If not, you should in the case there is ever a legal issue you know you’re handling the information in the correct manner. One feature of EDM, which reduces administrative labor, automatically moves documents to an offline archive once they are no longer needed.
5. Higher-Level, Highly Customized Confidentiality:
Identify work groups and grant permission rights to certain designated users. (I.E., some users may need access to AP documents, others to AR, and others to both.) And with even more granular permission rules, offer rights on what each individual can do with those documents? Can they delete it? Update it? Share it? Etc. In other words, grant complete, immediate access only when applicable.
Remember the 20-year-old college intern you hired at your law firm to repeatedly trek back and forth to the file room, pulling the appropriate box of paperwork for each attorney? A successful Document Management Program does more than just save your intern a lot of steps. It offers your organization maximum speed, control and coordination in the way you move documents across your office.
"The Document Management Decision—The Numbers That Say Just Do It" ›
