Almost every organization gets messed up managing countless paper-based documents like contracts, employee details, invoices, vendor agreements and policies, and various file formats, even if they follow the paperless and cloud storage system.
Due to the absence of a central location for file storage, HR has to switch between the many document management systems or browse through various folders and email inboxes for data storage and maintenance.
Creating software responsible for the entire data collection, maintaining the data and analyzing them for future betterment becomes comparatively easier.
A right document management system is not only cost-effective and less time-consuming, but it also lessens the responsibility and maintains the data accuracy properly.
This article shares why you use the document management system in your organization and, how to implement the document management system, what are the key features and benefits of the document control system, and more.
What is Document Management System?
A Document Management system or document management solution is a system that allows bulk data creation, storage, managing, indexing, protecting every document and maintaining data accuracy. Document management system software mainly stores employee details and office documents in the cloud and on mobile devices.
It is a cloud framework that facilities the easy and secure flow of critical information and provides around-the-clock access to digital documents, from around the world.
Organizations can operate enterprise content management systems (ECM) with the right document management system.
What is Employee Document Management?
Employee document management is a storage system that keeps the official records of all current and past employees within an organization. It involves creating a systematic approach to handle and maintain employee-related documents safely throughout their lifecycle, from hiring to separation.
The employee document management systems may use electronic document management software, cloud storage solutions, or other digital platforms to organize and secure employee records.
What is Document Respiratory?
A centralized enterprise document management repository is a digital storage system that allows organizations to store, organize, and manage their documents in a centralized location. It is a single, unified repository streamlining the business processes to manage documents that can be accessed by authorized users from anywhere, anytime.
With this document respiratory, the organization can arrange a secure, organized, and easily accessible storage location security for all electronic documents. It provides a consistent format of the documents ensuring easy to find, maintain, store and share if required.
Additionally, a centralized document respiratory can easily comply with regulatory requirements and industry standards.
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How Does the Document Management System (DMS) Work?
➔ Document Capture
In document management software, an organization gathers documents from any source. It is known as indexing.
In this procedure, an organization can process the document, classified by adding the terms to the documents’ metadata, like the order number or customer number.
• Paper Documents
For paper documentation, organizations need high-speed scanners for capturing paper documents. Then the scan copies are transferred to the document management systems.
And the indexing is completed by hand or some ERP software screen integration, zone optical character recognition (OCR) or barcoding etc.
• Email Attachments
Gathering and managing documents through email is a key part of business processes today.
Receiving documents like invoices and storing them in document management software by providing proper barcoding is trending nowadays.
• System Generated Reports
Prior-generated reports or systems-generated documents can easily be stored in the document management system.
It is a secure process as well. Most warehouse-based companies have those kinds of report management capabilities that keep securely at inventory levels in a warehouse to sales trends. It helps the organization make the documents available to your warehouse managers and sales teams faster.
• Capture for Any Application
A document management system ensures your ability to import documents instantly, helps you to classify the necessary documents and records management makes it easier to track electronic documents and route them for future use.
In any organization, there must have other applications for customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) that produce documents. Capturing those documents and storing them in a document management system is one of the trending ideas as well.
➔ Document Storage
Document management systems need to have central document storage. It is crucial for managing and retaining documents coming from all over the place.
Central document storage is essential mainly for mainly two reasons.
• Central Document Storage
Organizations are starting to incorporate remote work structures where employees need immediate access to work on documents from anywhere, anytime. Central document storage is a one-time solution for maintaining business documents and reports so the employees can operate the required documents remotely.
Central document storage can be used for static documents like bills, invoices, and purchase orders and dynamic documents like employee personal details, webpage, and emails. The appearance of cloud-based document storage streamlines the entire storage process.
• Providing Security
Besides having central document storage facilities, Document storage can improve security by providing better access control, encryption, audit trails, disaster recovery, and version control.
It ensures permission every time from the users so that the organization can control access and track employee movement. You can define user rights to the author, revise, view, route, or delete documents.
➔ Central Document Distribution
Document distribution is another key component of the document management system. With this component, organizations can send numerous documents to customers, employees, and vendors.
Due to high-end security features, there is two-way verification in the document distribution process for every document.
With this management system, the company can distribute numerous documents through email or other FTP.
➔ Process and Workflow Automation
Retrieving, storing documents, and distributing them is just the beginning a proper document management system ensures the process of digital business content and automates the manual process and workflows.
Let’s discuss the automation of the manual process. It is pretty simple. The organization sets up the system. Rest processes will be taken place automatically. Suppose you receive an invoice with the document management system.
The invoice can easily be routed to the account payable system. If the system detects a problem, it sends a notification else the invoice will be paid instantly. There is no need for any approval process anymore.
Proper electronic document management system software with ERP assistance is a great process automating the entire workflow process.
Consider an order that originated in your ERP and accelerates the workflow processes in the document management system. It leads to the further approval process fulfilment automatically.
6 Benefits of Document Management Software
Document management systems (DMS) or other enterprise content management solutions and solutions provide a centralized platform for managing digital documents throughout their entire lifecycle, from creation and storage to retrieval and eventual disposition. Here are some benefits of using a document management system:
1. Hassle-free Storage
Storing paper documents and maintaining high-end security is a real challenge for every organization. Even you can’t sell the employee paper records and documents even after decades.
To avoid the paper hassle, if you choose a virtual storage system, it is troublesome as well cause after some time, you have to buy some storage for the enhanced commercial property.
A software-based document management system can reduce the requirement for the file cabinet, boxes, storage, and bins, and you don’t need to buy some extra storage. Trillions of data can easily be saved securely in cloud-based document management software.
More you can enjoy the added data accuracy and data scheduling features. You can get any required data at anytime, anywhere in seconds.
2. Enhanced Document Security
Secure employee document is one of the key responsibilities of organizations. So that any random person can’t attend the data-stealing or document purging. Right document management systems track electronic documents, maintain version control and secure every document by maintaining a proper sequence. Moreover, it protects sensitive data and provides better control over complex documents as well.
Besides, document management systems leave an audit trail of recent viewers. Since the system keeps a track of the users who accessed the documents, it becomes easy to track any changes. The system will also alert the authorized personnel whenever it detects any suspicious activity like unauthorized access or unwarranted changes.
3. Easier Document Retrieval
Document management systems (DMS) can significantly improve document retrieval by providing quick and easy authentic access to documents. With the right document management system, organizations can retrieve documents and store centralized data.
They can search for required metadata and maintain multiple versions of documents. Document management systems solutions can save time and reduce the frustration associated with document retrieval, ultimately improving productivity by providing easy and efficient access to documents.
4. Better Collaboration
Document management systems (DMS) can work well for team collaboration. Many DMS is designed specifically to bring betterment in collaboration, allowing multiple users to access and edit documents simultaneously, track changes, and manage document versions. Some of the key features that make DMS ideal for team collaboration include;
• Version Control
With version control, team members can work on the same document without worrying about overwriting each other’s changes. It ensures that everyone is working with the latest version of the document and that changes are tracked and can be easily undone if necessary.
• Access Control
MS can allow administrators to set user permissions and access levels to ensure that only authorized team members can access, edit, and share documents.
• Workflow Automation
Workflow automation features in document management systems can help streamline collaboration processes by automating tasks such as document review and approval, notifications, and reminders.
• Real-time Collaboration
Many DMS offer real-time collaboration features, such as comments, chat, and co-authoring, allowing team members to work together in real-time on the same document.
5. Better Backup and Disaster Recovery
Earlier, organizations stored the documents as piles of papers on the shelf or in a storage room for data backup. Further, the digital archive comes, yet the complexity of document management remains still. The organization started to buy lots of storage for saving documents.
With a DMS, documents become highly traceable and secure. Organizations can track and maintain backups using a range of criteria. Proper document tracking capabilities and data maintenance features reduce document purge and misplacement.
6. Increased Productivity
In this competitive world, time is valuable. Spending time on document management and maintenance can affect company productivity. A proper document management system is a one-stop solution for error-free document management, maintenance and storage.
It leads to easy access to required information, reduces document duplication, improves communication, and speeds up project completion. The DMS boost staff morale and increases client satisfaction. So, productivity is automatically boosted.
The Core Feature of the Document Management Solution
The core feature of a Document Management solution is to provide a centralized platform for storing, organizing, and managing electronic documents and files. This includes both structured data (e.g., spreadsheets and databases) and unstructured data (e.g., word-processing documents, images, and videos).
In this section, we are talking about the features of the document management system and solution.
➔ Upload Documents
The first core feature is uploading documents. The organizations mainly upload documents from two main sources either through combined paper files or digital files.
The ideal document management system along with information retrieval systems inputs files through the following sources: Scanner, Email, Manual Upload, Bulk Upload, Automated Process for Mass Uploading, Mobile Applications, Web Services, etc.
➔ Document Indexing
Document indexing is arranging documents in various terms. Likewise, if your documents are in text formation, you should index the documents for a full-text search where you can find a phrase for the document.
The entire document management system should have some level of system indexing. There are some default system indexing like the date or document types that defines the document. Besides, the many document management system provides,
- Document Control and Numbering
- Content recognition and indexing
- Indexing electronic images and Meta Data
- OCR in different languages
- Supports innumerable formats
- Extendable metadata fields
➔ Document Search
Proper indexing will follow the relevant search result. With the right document management system, your document search engine should provide safe and relevant search results, appropriate metadata search, advanced search on all document attributes and more.
➔ Organizes Documents
Document Processing involves the conversion of paper-based format to virtual format or electronic documents through Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR), OCR and optimised Data Entry options.
An ideal document management system should have the features like documents that use templates, linking documents to record in the system, access files, Link to ERP/CRM system, Forward, Move, Share Documents, document versioning, revising and storing Documents, Check-In and Check-out documents through output systems, etc.
➔ Document Automation
A proper document management system uses enterprise-level business process management and the right workflow automation that not only increases employee engagement but also accelerates productivity.
With the DMS, the organization can schedule rule-based processing on the incoming document, set up policies and document actions, enjoy the automatic and manual workflow and configure multi-level approvals effectively.
➔ Document Security
Security is one of the most critical aspects of a document management system. The ideal software will provide a high level of documents encryption and role-based access, as well as:
- Audit Trail
- User and Roles
- Advanced Access rights
- Encrypted Documents on the file system
- Indexing all revisions
- Supports SSL
- Modify Ownership
➔ User Dashboard
An ideal DMS interface should have a user-friendly dashboard with affluent storage capacity for a better future experience.
For increased productivity, the main dashboard should have a proper document and workflow inbox, alerts and notifications, reporting dashboard, follow-ups and chat, an inbuilt calendar, Email, SMS, etc.
➔ Document Management and Customization
Users can customize the other own document management system as per their requirements A right document management system must have some customization features like creating custom fields and generating customized records, adding custom document attributes, and more.
End Notes
Managing the documents at the same time as handling the complete workforce management software is challenging. A document management system is an essential tool for managing documents in today’s digital age.
It helps organizations streamline their document management processes and improve efficiency, accuracy, and security. So that organizations can focus on workplace productivity and company growth.
