Documents are the lifeblood of a business – smarter documents mean smarter business.   An intelligent document lifecycle can ignite innovation, productivity and efficiency across an organization. With the growing availability of document management tools, there are many options that will allow you to capture and manage digital documents. Organizations that implement the right document management solution not only create a competitive advantage for themselves but gain vital new ways to think and work.

Any document-centric department within an organization not only needs a strong digital-document management strategy, but the right tools to make it real. Done right, the strategic and tactical benefits are transformational – reducing costs and risks, and improving business performance by streamlining workflow, hardened security, making any document easily accessible at any time.

1. Analog is Dead – Digital is In.

Document management systems save trees, money, time and make life easy.   Every office prints but about 64 percent of businesses have no means whatsoever to track exactly how much, where or even what gets printed. Printing is so ubiquitous that its presence gets taken for granted, making it difficult to remember to track all of the different expenses which go into creating documents:

  • Paper
  • Toner or ink cartridges
  • Electricity
  • Printers
  • Software subscriptions
  • Outsourced print jobs
  • Maintenance and repairs
  • Productivity bottlenecks from large jobs

Document management systems reduce and/or eliminate these dynamics while delivering critical advantages to going digital that includes process visibility and eliminating the need for analog output to paper. With visibility, it becomes much easier to measure and manage document-centric operations, track consumable inventory levels such as paper and toner, and see what gets printed, where, when and why. Using this data, a company can gain a better sense how to minimize printing or eliminate it altogether by going digital. Top performers re-allocate all the wasted financial, operational and human resources back into customer service, growth and innovation.  And win.

2. “The Frog in Water” – Paper Document Storage Costs.

The analog document world is expensive, and the reality is, many organizations are so familiar with the “old way” that it is left to fester and grow.   Those filing cabinets you don’t even notice are silent killers – draining resources and aggregating risk and costs in model from a time gone-by. Instead of pursuing an effective paper-to-digital strategy, many simply purchase additional office space, equipment or off on/off-site services that does nothing to improve performance while creating even deeper problems to remedy in the future. Digital document systems break this vicious cycle by:

  • Making any document accessible from any connected device, anywhere, anytime – better decisions faster
  • Freeing up valuable office space to allocate to higher value purposes
  • Strengthening and maintaining compliance with relevant law/policy
  • Reducing the amount of time employees spend looking for documents
  • Optimizing workflow by automatically connecting documents to the processes they drive
  • Preventing lost or misplaced documents and the risk/damage that they create
  • Leveraging offsite cloud storage to support disaster recovery plans

Modern document management systems are more accessible than ever with a cloud-based platform that delivers anytime, anywhere, any device document access without the filing cabinet “dinosaur” costs, risks and limitations.

3. Create More Time and Capacity.

Cloud-based document management systems reduce personnel costs by allowing employees to locate, retrieve and handle documents much more quickly so they can do more of what matters. In fast-paced offices, the new model represents a critical advantage by enabling informed, accurate decisions in real-time.

Likewise, document management systems help streamline workflows by standardizing how documents are managed to ensure they are always available to the right people and the processes they drive. In the new world, organizations can find what they need, are always document-audit ready and focused on their mission vs. searching through document chaos for needed information.

In addition, document management systems cut down on redundancy or other inefficient processes, which may be slowing down staff or the overall office workflow. Much of this occurs because a document management system can leverage automation and integration, two powerful tools, which drive productivity to greater heights.

4. Security. Security.  Security.

Paper based documents are risky.  Very risky, in fact. Paper-based documents are vulnerable to a wide range of events leading to their physical destruction. It happens all the time, running a gamut including theft, flood, or fire, which can destroy millions of irreplaceable records.  Most businesses today can’t survive a sudden loss of these business records.

In contrast, digital document storage has the advantage of being stored offsite with redundancy, far away from whatever perils may befall a location. Specifically, for businesses located in areas prone to natural disasters and severe weather, this may be the difference between disaster recovery and permanent closure.

Additionally, cloud-based storage has many security advantages including being exponentially more difficult for hackers to access than internal servers. This translates to fewer costly breaches, and IT gets to spend less time worrying about document security or maintaining secure systems.

Smart Document Management with Intellinetics

Hopefully, this article has illuminated some callouts that have you thinking. Documents are the lifeblood of processes and hold the lion’s share of a typical organization’s knowledge making their protection of paramount importance. Likewise, a strong document management system not only protects these documents but also helps a business reduce operational costs – a critical feature of staying competitive in any environment. Join the digital document revolution and win.

Intellinetics delivers smart document management systems that take full advantage of the digital tools available to the modern business. Speak with an expert today to discover how a document management system can reduce costs and drive office productivity.