Holly Condon • October 1, 2021
Yet business efficiency, productivity, and growth depend heavily on the critical document management process. That’s why having a cutting-edge document management system (DMS) is essential, provided it has the following capabilities.
Data breaches don’t just target the most prominent companies. They target small businesses as well, often because they’re seen as easier targets. Without a unified way to manage all the sensitive information in your care, it’s practically impossible to apply sufficiently robust security controls.
A DMS should provide the necessary controls for protecting documents and archives from misuse or data loss. Common security features that every DMS should have include the ability to define access rights, separate data into security clearance categories, and mirroring systems to provide redundancy.
A lot of established businesses are stunted by information silos where different departments won’t or can’t readily share information. This happens due to a lack of a cohesive operational environment in which there’s no standardized way to do things.
A DMS should offer a unified system that’s easy to use for everyone throughout the business. This is especially true when choosing a cloud-based solution, where relevant parties are able to access documents online, instead of having to go into the office.
Cloud-based solutions are also maintained by a service provider to eliminate the responsibility on your end.
Business documents exist in many different forms. Most businesses still deal with paper-based correspondence and forms as well, while digital documents come in numerous formats.
You need a DMS that can accommodate everything. Document capture automates the ability to scan in paper documents and import electronic ones from all industry-standard formats. An excellent document capture process should support both structured and unstructured data in every file format from Microsoft Office documents to CAD drawings.
As soon as documents are captured into the system, a first-rate DMS should be able to automatically tag and index them using optical character recognition (OCR) technology. Doing this means documents can be retrieved in seconds by typing just a few keywords in a search bar.
For example, entering a client’s name will pull up relevant documents like invoices, sales orders, and customer records. This beats having to manually sift through piles of paperwork to find the documents you need.
Managing documents has traditionally been a time-consuming and tedious task, and one that’s vulnerable to costly human error. To increase morale and productivity, you should automate these routine tasks so you can act on the information gathered instead of spending most of your time actually trying to gather and archive it.
A DMS should provide a visualized overview of your workflows, allowing you to appoint members of your team, manage access rights with ease, and seamlessly organize parallel and linear tasks. Automation will help drive productivity by letting your employees focus on more important and rewarding tasks.
There’s no such thing as a single solution that can meet all your business requirements. While a DMS adds a very important functionality to one of your most important business processes, that doesn’t mean it can do everything.
To eliminate information silos and compatibility issues, you need a system that works with your existing infrastructure. For instance, you might want to retrieve customer documents using your CRM software or create team portals where each team has easy access to the resources they need.
The best DMS ship with an open API for simplified integration with other business software.
The amount of data today’s organizations are faced with is growing all the time. It’s become impossible to keep up with when you’re relying on manual means alone.
For example, if Google were to print out all its data, it would need 1.5 trillion storage boxes. While you might not have nearly that amount of information in your care, it does illustrate the fact that the data volume is constantly growing, hence the need for scalable technology that can handle likely future needs.
A cloud-based solution offers storage on demand, which is a huge advantage over relying on in-house infrastructure that needs constant upgrades.
PairSoft is a DMS solution that possesses all these capabilities, and much more. If you want to transform your operations and level up your business efficiency, call us today or schedule a free personalized demo to see what our cloud solutions can do.
With over 25 years' experience in the SaaS space, Holly brings a wealth of industry knowledge to the table. She previously held leadership roles at PairSoft's subsidiary PaperSave and resides in South Carolina with her family.
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