10 Best Practice Tips When Implementing a Document Management System

A Document Management System automates the process of managing documents from creation to storage and distribution throughout an organisation, increasing efficiency and reducing the cost and clutter of maintaining paper records. As such, businesses are now looking at implementing a cloud-based document management system to help manage, maintain, and safely store these important business documents.

In this blog, we look at 10 best practice tips for your business when implementing a Document Management System.

1 – Establish a team for the implementation

Transitioning to an online digital system for your business’s document management will require collaboration for it to be successful. Ideally, the implementation team will come from a mix of departments who will be able to provide key perspective and requirements for the whole business, not just one point of view from one part of the business.

2 – Establish a time frame for the implementation

With any project, without an established timeframe, you run the risk of a time blowout. Instead, collaborate with your implementation team, build a timeline for each task, and set completion goals for each.

3 – Review Current Documents

You’ll be surprised how many documents and types of documents are created and stored over time in a business. Every department, each position, and team will have a document relevant to them. Your project team should take this opportunity to audit these documents and establish the following:

4 – Allocate a document owner to each document

Every document should have a document owner. This owner is responsible for the creation of the document, ensuring the right teams and employees have access to the document as well as ongoing versioning, updates, and maintenance of the document.

5 – Know who needs access to the document

A document management system automates the distribution of a document throughout an organisation. However, when creating the document into the system, you first need to know who requires access to the document. The document owner will need to establish:

6 – Understand the legal requirements of each document

The compliance requirements for some documents can be very complex and having no compliance can result in fines, cancellation of licenses, and in some cases, criminal liability. The key things to consider are:

7 – Know the workflow

Your digital workflows for document management don’t necessarily reflect the manual workflows of your paper-based system – they will be more efficient and automated. Your workflows will be set up when you start to load your documents into your document management system.

8 – Load into the Document Management System

Now that all the preparation is complete, you can start uploading your documents into the document management system. Each document should be loaded into the system by the document owner who can then create, build in the document workflow requirements, and allocate to the appropriate people. Your document management system settings that you’ve established while creating the document, will automate the workflows and key requirements for the document for your organisation.

9 – Communication is Key

There’s nothing worse than when you receive an email in your inbox and have total confusion by its contents. However, this can be easily null and void by making an establishment that the wider business knows that there is a change in your documents procedure. For example, how you communicate will be dependent on your business (intranet, memo, email), such as:

10 – Gather Feedback

With any new process or system, it’s important to gather feedback from the wider team and business on how the implementation is working for them. It will help you understand the ins and outs of the everyday usage of the document management system and will allow you to review your process moving forward.