5 Ways to Improve Efficiency with a Document Management System

All businesses are looking for ways to streamline processes, improve efficiency, and increase productivity. Implementing a good Document Management System across your organisation can have the potential to save time and enable you to achieve cost-savings across your company.

Let’s take a look at the top 5 ways a Document Management System can improve efficiency across your business, saving you both time and money.

---

1 – Document Searching

Believe it or not, research by the IDC (International Data Corporation) found that employees on average spend 3.5 hours each week searching for documents. Rather than spending time searching for physical paper documents in a filing cabinet or scrolling through endless folders on your desktop or email, a Document Management System provides a secure central location for everyone in your business to store, manage and share their documents.

2 – Increase Speed of Processes

Any business process that requires sign off, approval, or collaboration can experience significant bottlenecks. Whether you’re updating a workplace policy, waiting for a new employee to return their documentation, or providing evidence for compliance purposes, you need a process to direct the document to the correct person. Managing this process manually takes the average employee 4.3 hours every week. With a Document Management System, these processes are automated, improving efficiency and reducing the cost and clutter of maintaining paper records.

3 – Automating Workflows

How does your business currently distribute documents throughout your organisation? If your process involves emailing documents to team members and running paperwork back and forth between staff, it’s no doubt time-consuming and provides an opportunity for human error, loss of important information and can slow growth and productivity.

The key to document management is automation. Once a document is captured, it should work for you. It should be there when you need it, and it should be accessible to those who need it when they need it. A Document Management System streamlines and automates the manual workflows associated with document management, from creation to storage and distribution throughout an organisation.

4 – Reducing Time When Auditing

Taking the necessary steps to meet your legal obligations as a business might seem simple, however, the process, in reality, can be more confusing and difficult than expected. Why? It can be due to the constantly evolving nature of regulation by some industries, difficulties understanding exactly what compliance means, what documents are required to prove compliance, and how each of those documents needs to be managed.

Implementing a document management system in your business will help you track and maintain the compliance records that are essential to your business’s ongoing success. Pulling documents together for audits and ensuring those documents have all the required information and data for that audit can now be accomplished in a few hours, rather than a few days.

5 – Improved Collaboration

The goal of collaboration in the workplace is to maximise the success of your business. A group of individuals has more power and impact than a single person and working in teams enables employees to share knowledge, work more efficiently and effectively. However, when your business is spread across teams, departments and locations, collaboration can be increasingly difficult to achieve.

Businesses rely on email, attaching on documents, and sending it to multiple recipients for feedback and input. Integrating your business’s document including emails attachments and scanned paper documents into a Document Management System makes it easier for employees to work together on projects and share information

Documents are a necessary part of any business or organisation and implementation of a Document Management System to manage these documents can streamline your business workflows and save you time and money.

To see how dita Solutions can assist you in implementing a document management system for the ongoing management of your workplace documents,  please contact us today.