Do You Need a Document Management Solution?

Five Worthwhile (and sometimes painful) Questions:

Every business has a document management challenge and every business has developed, over time, ways to cope with that challenge. Whether your current document management solution looks as complex as rooms in multiple locations around the country filled with filing cabinets, and a veritable army of clerks to maintain them; or as simple as stacks of cardboard boxes piled around the perimeter of the office you’ re sitting in right now; there are affordable, realistic, and functional solutions available to help.

To help you decide if your company has outgrown your current methods of dealing with that document management challenge, There are five simple questions to determine your need for a more robust document management solution.

Does filing, retrieving and storing paper documents consume human and monetary resources that could be better used elsewhere?

If you currently have staff members that are dealing with paper filing and duplication tasks that are not a part of their core job function, or whose time could be put to better use, then you are missing a major opportunity. It’ s not uncommon to be able to shift 2/3 of the resources dedicated to paper handling to other tasks after implementing a document management system. A recent Price-Waterhouse study concluded a lifetime cost per page at $.25. These costs are completely eliminated by going to a digital solution. Of course in addition to the costs are the various forms of labor associated with the retrieval of these documents.

Whether it is the ability to scale your business without additional hires or the option to reassign resources to more valuable tasks a document management solution should be in your plans.

Does your company have compliance standards or regulatory oversight that must be complied with?

If you’ re a public company, Sarbanes-Oxley makes the answer an automatic yes, but even small and medium sized privately owned businesses face OSHA, taxation, employment, and other federal guidelines for document storage and security. Depending on your particular specialization your business probably also faces requirements associated with HIPAA, ISO, FDICIA, the USA PATRIOT Act, or a host of other rules and standards. When faced with the fact that 2-4% of all documents are misfiled and 7.5% are completely lost, the possibility of non-compliance is high.

Document management systems do away with the risk of misfiling or losing documents, meaning you can always produce the document that your auditors are requesting.

Is there gap between your paper information and your enterprise data?

Even after implementing CRM, Accounting and ERP systems a huge portion of your corporate knowledge still exists in paper form. Vendor invoices, bills, Purchase Orders’ s, quotes, fax orders, and packing slips (to mention a few) are still filed, duplicated, passed around, and inevitably lost. Many businesses also have repositories of technical information or historical reports that are only available as paper at a single geographic location, not to mention, the documents stored on desktop hard drives and personal filing cabinets.

A document management system that is integrated with your enterprise software allows you to access your entire business knowledge storehouse from your desktop with security settings, back-ups and disaster recovery safeguards.

Do you have paper-intensive processes that create delays or lack oversight?

Another study estimated that 90% of all paper documents passed around an organization on a daily basis are merely shuffled and that no significant information is added or decisions made – sound familiar? It is also said that corporate professionals spend 40-60% of their time processing paper. By ensuring that early steps in a process are completed correctly before passing them along, processing time can easily be cut by as much as 50%. Add the efficiencies of completing these approvals online and you can gain significant throughput improvements and a competitive advantage.

A document management solution with a workflow process lets you recreate cumbersome paper processes online allowing you to speed approvals, and giving you the oversight you need to determine where these processes are breaking down, stalling, or working smoothly.

Do you have multiple departments, sites, or remote employees that need access to the same content?

If you have multiple sites or remote sales representatives, a document management solution can almost certainly increase collaboration and speed document processing. In some cases the cost of physically sending packages between sites may pay for a significant portion of the system!

Whether it is allowing sales people to remotely submit expense reports and project quotes, or the power to reorganize your Accounts Payable processes to allow for central processing; the ability to share knowledge, route information, and silo responsibilities across multiple sites will save your business money and promote efficiency.

If you have answered yes to even one of these questions then implementing a document management strategy for your business can streamline operations, encourage cooperation, and enforce security and compliance – giving your company a competitive advantage.  For more information or if you would like to schedule a demo, please contact us at info@axisglobalpartners.com.  To view this web-based document management and workflow solution please visit www.docAssist.com and take the Tour.  Sample a FREE 30 day Trial Demo.