Your Document Management Knowledge Center

How Document Management is Like the Game of Soccer

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!

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DocuVantage to Showcase Online Document Management and Process Automation at the 2010 Florida Association of Counties Annual Conference

As Florida County Budgets Shrink, County Departments and Agencies Turn to DocuVantage to Maintain and Improve Services.

Tampa, FL. – June 1, 2010 – Budget cuts can cripple departments. Don’t let this happen to you. Learn how automating the manual processes that consume so many of your resources can save your department.

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DocuVantage Offers Tools Helping Organizations Improve Their Business Processes

Special Offer to Jump-Start Workflow Mapping.

Tampa, FL. – May 26, 2010 – With organizations striving to improve their efficiency and make an impact on their bottom line, DocuVantage has made it easier to get started with a business process mapping jump start.

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8. Implementation is easy. Daily use is even easier. Just go to your browser!

From implementation to daily use, software as a service document management is as easy as searching with your Internet browser.

Your online document management vendor will first speak with you to gather the key information needed to assess your needs, set up and activate your account. Your organization can be worry free, since the implementation is the vendor’s responsibility. They will take care of this for you!

From then on, you only need to worry about logging into the system. To do this, you simply pull up your browser and login to the online portal.

To find a document, you can navigate to the search tab and search for the file according to file attributes such as document title, date, author, etc. OR you can do a text search, by simply entering keywords that may be included in the document.

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Document Management, Cost and High Volume Document Capture are No Longer Barriers to Productivity

DocuVantage’s integration with EzeScan offers quick and easy batch document scanning without capital expenditures.

Tampa, FL. - May 13, 2010 -- Document Advantage Corporation® (DocuVantage®) and EzeScan have partnered to provide affordable, quick and easy batch document scanning directly into DocuVantage's online document management platform. Organizations can now capture and manage any volume of documents without capital expenditures.

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Thinking About Giving Your Employees the Option to Work From Home?

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.

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7. Be prepared for the unexpected.

 

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DocuVantage Offers Document Management Savings in Honor of Earth Day

TAMPA, Fla.--(April 21, 2010) -- Businesses looking to “go green," use less paper and reduce costs need DocuVantage. Using DocuVantage OnDemand®, an online document and information management platform, companies will have the ability to reduce the amount of paper they use to run their businesses. Users can collaborate and manage operations online, store and protect important company documents, enforce records retention for compliance and automate business processes. DocuVantage OnDemand® makes it easy for businesses to eliminate waste from printing, copying, filing and shredding paper while reducing their operational costs.

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6. Immediate and universal access to your documents.

Have you left a document you needed to review back in your office while you were travelling? Or have you needed someone to review a document so you can complete a task you were working on only to find out that they were out of the office? What if you needed multiple people to review or approve a document and they worked in different offices in different countries? All of these can be frustrating unless you use an online document management system.

Worse yet, without an electronic document management system, documents can be lost. Even if not lost, it takes time to get a document from one person to another. If you are making copies of documents, then you run the risk of having people reviewing out of date copies. Let’s face it; paper is no longer the medium of business. Unfortunately paper is not going away anytime soon.

Let’s use a real life example from one of our customers. Imagine that you work for a global charity that deals with a large number of contracts and agreements on a daily basis. Each of these documents requires a review and approval process. Each process used to start with one individual, who completes his or her specific task, and then faxes or overnights the document to the next step in the process for execution. Some of these documents are even being sent overseas for signatures authorization, making it extremely difficult for collaboration and lengthening the amount of time needed to complete a transaction.

Now with an electronic document management system, the process is much more efficient. The process may still start with one person creating a document. However, when they are done with the document, it is automatically routed to the correct person for review, approval and electronic signatures. If the next person in the process makes changes to the documents, the revisions are tracked so that everyone in the process can collaborate on making sure that the document reflects the needs of the organization. Each time someone is done with their part of the process, the document is automatically routed to the next person in the process until it hits the stage where it is a final approved document. This happens across offices, across time zones and across countries.  No more waiting, no more reviewing out of date documents and no more lost time due to a manual process.

Even if you are not dealing with offices across the world, with a web-based platform, users can access the system from anywhere at any time, domestically and/or internationally. Not only is this great for international companies, but also for any organization that wishes to give its employees the option from working from home. With the online document platform, employees can securely collaborate together on specific documents from all over the world without having to mail or fax paper files. When finished reviewing, they check in the document, in which it will be automatically routed to the next appropriate person in the review or approval process.

Even if everyone in your organization works in one office, using online document management software can speed up your processes. I know this for a fact. Before document management, it was just as easy to lose a document on my desk as it was to lose one in the mail.
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5. 99.9% uptime guarantee.

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.

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