A comprehensive document management plan is a key step toward improving your business processes and boosting your company’s competitiveness. However, it’s no easy task of simply flipping a switch and getting everyone onboard with the new strategy. You’ll have to help every team understand how organizing your processes based on documents can boost the efficiency and productivity of your team.
One of the most obvious advantages of an EDMS is that it removes the need to store, manage and secure data sharing retrieve physical files. This helps your team regain storage space and storage space that can be used to serve other purposes, lessens the risk of lost files (or a paper file being lost) and eliminates the requirement to allocate the time and resources of employees as well as budgets to maintaining a system of organized and structured documents.
Furthermore, many EDMS platforms are platform-agnostic and allow teams to collaborate on projects from desktops or mobile devices without losing data integrity, document control or access to content. They also offer real-time monitoring tools that are easy to understand and allow you to see how your document driven processes are working at an aft-level of 10,000 feet.
A EDMS will also automatically store copies of every iteration of documents throughout their entire lifecycle. This is crucial to ensure compliance with legal regulations and retention of documents. It will also enable the imposition of an obligation to hold documents, which prevents them from being modified or deleted until the hold is lifted. This is a major benefit over the DIY method of managing documents that many organizations use with file-sharing apps like Google Drive or Box. These applications can quickly become inadequate for a growing business that requires robust control of its files and indexing capabilities.