Does my Business need Document Management System?

On an average day, a business processes a lot of purchase orders, transaction documents, vouchers, receipts, contracts, agreements, or proposals. This information flows from various sources and across business divisions and heads.

It becomes hard to keep track of what document is stored where, where is the latest version of the document, etc. Documents are replicated again and again and shared haphazardly without any control of who should have access to the documents and who should not.

Why Businesses Need Document Management System

This unorganized and scattered mess of documents makes management of any business very hard because when you actually need a specific piece of document, it seems lost.

Productivity goes down

In this type of unorganized system productivity of an organization suffers a lot. A lot of time is wasted in searching and retrieving documents. Manpower is needed to just ensure that files are kept moving from desk to desk for approval, which is also a poor way to ensure security.

Money is wasted as large physical spaces with appropriate paraphernalia to needed to store the files properly and correctly. The effort is wasted in maintaining the storage space so that no damage comes to the files like water spotting or fire.

Production gets delayed & products quality suffers

All of this would make getting a document approved to do anything a very slow and laborious process. This would mean that production would get delayed and there will be chances of the quality of the product going down.

Production delay and quality degradation of the product means that customer trust would wane and the growth of the business will suffer. In the light of so many issues arising from the mismanagement of documents of a business, it is absolutely necessary that documents of a business are managed very carefully.

Storage & management of documents become easy

Here it is where a document management system becomes crucial. A good DMS system not only makes the storage and management of your documents easy for you but also keeps your documents secure and safe from disasters. Since all the documents are digital, the physical storage that is required to store physical documents is reduced by a lot. This saves money and manpower for an organization.

Since the documents are stored based on their indexing information and meta-tagging information attached to a document, searching for a particular document becomes very easy. You could search a document based on its title, author’s name, or any other tags that you attached to the document. This is in contrast to searching for information in physical files which could take a few minutes to a few hours. A DMS system would complete this search in seconds saving you precious time and freeing you to do the actual work instead of just a manual search.

Safety and security of documents is also ensured with DMS

Security is another big issue that organizations face with physical documents. Theoretically, anybody could open and peek at potentially sensitive documents in a file lying on a desk or while the file is being moved to one department or another. This will compromise the integrity of the document and the business.

A document management system on the other hand allows you to control who exactly can and cannot access a document at a group level or an individual level. You can also view who downloaded the file, track if any modifications have been made to the document and who made them. This makes the whole system very transparent and ensures the security of the documents.

Conclusion

There are a lot many other benefits of document management system would provide you with, but answer the question that we started with initially- whether it’s a small business or a big enterprise, both would benefit from using a good document management system.