Automating your business processes is an excellent way to increase workflow efficiency. It can help your company streamline its communication, enforce accountability, and reduce its overall costs.
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Every organization needs a document management strategy. Having one:
- Improves access to information
- Reduces operating costs
- Diminishes litigation risk
- Protects critical information
If your organization doesn’t have one, it’s time you considered developing one. Not having one puts your organization at an unnecessary risk and decreases overall efficiency. Luckily, we’ve laid out everything you need to get started with yours.
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Trying to keep track of and manage paper documents for over 100 employees and thousands of volunteers - across 12 locations - is difficult. But it was becoming exceptionally burdensome to this environmental NGO’s HR team. Sending files to their varied locations meant duplicating, copying, and faxing large amounts of paper that quickly became unmanageable. Needing a more efficient and greener solution, they began searching for a way to go digital.
This HR team knew they needed a solution that would allow them to easily access and share documents securely between locations without adding more applications and servers for their IT staff to maintain. After considering various solutions - such as Box and DropBox - they chose to use DocuVantage OnDemand for managing personnel files and gain control of the documents critical to their organization.
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If you’re using a document management or enterprise content management system only to organize and retrieve documents, then you may be overlooking a huge range of other uses that can make your company run much more efficiently.
Here are 3 initial examples of high value uses you may not know about:
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Anytime a system gets hacked the first thing we’re told to do is “change your password”. Following through with this advice is a smart move since it prevents stolen information from being used to gain access to users’ accounts. However, there is a challenge that arises in implementing this solution: the user.
While most large scale security breaches are from external attacks, the user of a system can create large and devastating security vulnerabilities. These largely stem from how users implement your system’s password requirements and their own bad habits in creating/managing their passwords.
The bad habits of your users can come back to haunt you, especially if it endangers your organizations legal obligations. Recently, the US Department of Health and Human Services fined “New York Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center $4.8 million for the disclosure of nearly 7,000 medical records because of lax technical safeguards” (Boston Globe).
Weak passwords make hacking easier. Ask yourself, “Is not having a password policy worth being fined over?” No, it’s not. If your organization handles documents and information that needs to be secured and stored electronically then you should begin implementing a password policy.
If you’re like most people, you’ve got some stacks of paper sitting on your desk awaiting your attention. But you’re super busy, and pretty soon you’re surrounded by a variety of piles and stacks – enough to make your blood pressure rise when you walk into the office.
In situations like this, confusion easily abounds and your productivity slowly decreases. You’re not sure where to find things, what’s important and what’s not, or where you should even put the stuff.
It’s easy for important documents to get misplaced or put at the bottom of the stack. Worst of all, this can be a huge liability for your company as important workflows halt or critical documents get lost or stolen.
Think putting all your documents “in the cloud” will solve your frustration in trying to find and collaborate on documents?
Think again.
There are a plethora of solutions out there that allow you to put your documents online for all to view and share. (All those with access rights, that is!) It’s pretty simple, really.
However, for most companies – especially those with multiple branches and locations – having folders in the cloud is just one teeny tiny part of the solution. By focusing on that alone, you could very well be just moving your problems from one platform to another.
Here are 4 document processes every company should clearly define before they do anything else:
Businesses often believe their in-house security is enough to keep their information safe; it’s not.
Security policies and preventive measures often go unenforced and are difficult to monitor.
This leaves a business open to a list of potentially devastating problems:
Most of the companies we talk to have four common problems that dramatically decrease their operational efficiency:
- Documents are mismanaged and stored all over the place (never in one central location).
- Limited or no access to documents when they really need them, especially when they're out of the office.
- Employees spend a good portion of their day searching for documents and pushing them from one person to the next.
- There are so many versions, they never know which one to use.
Eventually, the mess becomes so frustrating that they come to the conclusion that they need a new system for storing their files. Dropbox and Google Drive are usually the first place they look, because at least their files will be stored in the cloud and easily accessible, right?
Only 6% of companies that undergo a catastrophic data loss actually survive. That's not good!
According to research from the University of Texas, 43% of companies that experience a catastrophic data loss will never reopen and 51% will end up closing within 2 years. Even worse, 44% of these disasters are caused by system malfunction.
While natural disasters like fire and floods can be devastating, human error can destroy just as much information. If someone spills a cup of coffee on a stack of files or within a file cabinet, will that information be lost to you forever? How will you recover data from an employee’s stolen laptop?