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It’s World Cup time! Time for hard work, teamwork and dedication. With the combination of these important ethics and the addition of technical skill, success is achieved.

Just as a soccer team creates and executes a strategy, a document management system is about strategy, organization and execution. If executed correctly, the game, or document management system, runs smoothly. So how is document management like the game of soccer?

The document management vendor plays the assistant coach role. Just as the assistant coach of the U.S. Men’s National Team, Lubos Kubik, has 20 years experience at both the professional and international level, the team of your document management vendor will include experts in the field. The vendor will have worked with organizations across various industries. As the assistant coach has dedicated his time and efforts to training the team to its best ability, the document management vendor will train your organization’s employees to make sure your document management implementation and on-going use is successful and effective. The key is to get everyone on the same page.

As the whistle signals game time kick-off, or in other words, once the system is implemented, the show is on. The soccer ball can be compared to your important business document(s). The purpose of soccer is to get the ball from one end of the field to other, to its final destination, GOAL!!! With a document management system, your document is entered into the system through scanning, uploading, or browsing. Once the document enters the workflow, it is moved from employee to employee, through the approval process, just as the soccer ball is passed from teammate to teammate. Anticipation is absolutely vital. Team players know where the ball is headed next. As one player releases the ball, it is sent on to the next person, just as once the employee has completed his or her task with the business document, it is automatically pushed through the workflow onto its next task.

Meanwhile, the head soccer coach decides who takes the field. He decides who plays where and when. He directs strategy and movement. Similarly, the management team of the company decides who has access to what documents. Through secure login settings, management regulates which documents are accessible to specific authorized people.

As the soccer team works together to get the ball to where it needs to be, the business document goes through its entire life cycle, until it has reached the end of its retention period. The forward takes the ball to the goal and shoots, SCORE! Your document management system alerts you that it is time for a specific document to be purged. Now, you are able to dispose of the document after it has fulfilled its business purposes. Done and done.

A soccer team dedicates time and practice to be able to perform to the best of its ability. With committed preparation, the team’s execution can be flawless. A document management vendor strives to continuously make improvements to make its system of highest quality and effectiveness. As the vendor dedicates its time and efforts to a successful implementation, your organization will be streamlined, more effective and organized, and in result, more profitable. Nothing beats a winning team!

Your nonprofit has been a successful organization for years, but the economy and workforce have forced you to look for even more areas where expenses can be cut. You’ve thought about cutting back on your marketing efforts, but hesitate. You have even looked at every activity your organization does to see if there is anything that can be eliminated. You’ve cut back where you’re able, but still, it’s not enough. To complicate matters further, you may even have staff, volunteers and vendors all over the world.

After all considerations, have you thought about giving staff and volunteers the option to work from home? If you are the traditional type of professional, you may think this sounds crazy. How is giving a “work from home” option going to cut back on operational costs without affecting the overall efficiency of the business? Cost savings may include the reduction of office space, furniture, network bandwidth and in some cases, computers and phone lines.

Ease your worries and relax a little. The Service Uptime Guarantee will be one of the key features of your SaaS platform. This is an important factor when choosing the right document management vendor for your organization.

Your SaaS document management software should be guaranteed to be operational 99.9% of the time in any calendar month. What does that 0.1% mean? It means that the service can only have 45 minutes of unplanned downtime outside of the normal scheduled maintenance window. It also means that your vendor is committed to ensuring that the service is available since the down time impacts their bottom line.

With the 99.9% guarantee, your SaaS vendor will monitor the system 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. No more worries or concerns that your server will go down, and your employees are unable to do their jobs. No more pagers for the on-call IT staff.  You no longer have to worry about hardware failures like disk drives, network cards or tape systems.  You can also forget about all those server OS patches and database patches, your vendor must do them. This guarantee allows you to have maximized business efficiency.