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Real Advantage of Paperless Office

Paperless Office

Businesses don’t realize that the time spent looking for documents costs them dearly and is detrimental to their business (31% of respondents said that if they weren’t looking for documents, they would be spending time on business development). There are many benefits to a paperless office, some of which you might not even have thought about.

Pragmatically speaking, a paperless office doesn’t exist. Paper will always find its way into an organization. Vendors will send contracts. Customers will send purchase orders. Potential employees will bring resumes.

“Going paperless”—eliminating paper usage and managing documents in the cloud or web-based filing systems—sounds hip, smart, and eco-friendly. However, the reality is that paper still permeates the modern office. And businesses have been slow to start the transition.

Even though this is considered a myth, almost all organizations are aiming for going paperless nowadays.

A few of the advantages of going paperless

Business development

With the time saved, executives can spend their time more productively, on developing the business. According to the YouGov survey, 30% of business managers and directors would spend the time they save on business development.

Better customer service

A digital document management system allows you to access all customer data, retrieving information such as customer orders and documents, allowing your business to proactively provide customer service, and respond to inquiries faster.

E-mail efficiency

A digital document management system that communicates with your server-based email system will allow you to save emails into the system just like any other document, making it easy for you to search your email history.

Return on investment

Businesses do not need to spend a lot of capital in order to have a digital document management system. There are cost-effective choices that will allow you to see a return on investment in as little as 6 months.

Greater document security

The security of the information stored in digital format is much greater than the security of the documents that are filed in paper. In addition to the fact that it’s easier to restrict the access to confidential information stored in digital format, it is also easier and less expensive to make backups, so that if files get lost or a data theft occurs, it’s possible (and much easier) to retrieve the information.

Meanwhile, documents  on paper are much more exposed to accidents – leaks, floods, fires – and is much more easily accessible to third parties.

Less overhead costs

Digitizing documents has a direct impact on cost reduction. Not only because companies don’t need to buy as much paper as before, but because it also saves on maintaining printers and purchasing spare parts.

On the other hand, if all of a company’s documents are digitised and can be sent by email, there is no need to spend on mailings anymore.

Less space dedicated to file storage

Freeing the space dedicated to filing physical documents is also one of the main advantages of a paperless office. A digital document management system allows companies to archive everything in the cloud or on private company servers.

The space that is saved can be dedicated to expanding offices or other uses that bring more value to employees, such as a rest area to socialize with colleagues.

Automatic audit trail

Increasingly, businesses need to adhere to strict guidelines on compliance and need to store records for many years. With a digital document management system, there are no limits to the amount of documents you can store, and every document will have a unique number –automatically generating an audit trail. This also gives the ability to make changes to documents and still keep the original, helping with compliance and audit guidelines.

Simplicity

With a digital document management system, you can simplify many business processes. Users can action or authorise tasks and transfer data with the touch of a button. Ordering goods and authorising invoices are just two of the best examples of daily tasks that become more efficient when done digitally.

What did we conclude?

Looking at all of the above-mentioned advantages, more and more companies are being driven to eliminate the use of paper in all their business processes.

At Pericent BPM and BPM Software, we’re already a paperless office, and we firmly believe in the benefits of document scanning and digital document management systems.

We are on a mission to help every organization become a part of the digital world by being a paperless office with the use of docEdge DMS.

If you would like to try docEdge for digitizing your documents and managing them online, request for a demo and try it free for 14 days.

 

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Definition of Document Management System

Document Management System

What is a document management system?

Document management, often referred to as Document Management Systems (DMS), is the use of a computer system and software to store, manage and track electronic documents and electronic images of paper-based information captured through the use of a document scanner.

Benefits of Document Management Systems?

A Document Management System (DMS) can be seen as a set of standardized practices that:

  • Control the creation and authentication of documents
  • Exercise version control where multiple versions of a document are maintained
  • Manage storage of documents in a way that facilitates convenient retrieval of a particular document when needed
  • Ensure security and safety of documents with the dual objectives of preventing unauthorized access to documents and allowing recovery from physical damage or loss of documents
  • Creates the policy for archiving old documents and disposing of them at the end of their life

The DMS can be manual or electronic, though the latter has such overwhelming advantages that wherever the investment is justified, an electronic document management system (EDMS) should be installed in full or part.

According to ISO 12651-2, a document is “recorded information or object which can be treated as a unit”. While this sounds a little complicated, it is quite simply what you have been using to create, distribute and use for years.

Document management is one of the precursor technologies to content management, and not all that long ago was available solely on a stand-alone basis like its imaging, workflow, and archiving brethren like docEdge DMs. It provides some of the most basic functionality to content management, imposing controls and management capabilities onto otherwise “dumb” documents. This makes it so that when you have documents and need to use them, you are able to do so.

 Key Features in Document Management Systems

  • Check-in/check-out and locking, to coordinate the simultaneous editing of a document so one person’s changes don’t overwrite another’s.
  • Version control, so tabs can be kept on how the current document came to be, and how it differs from the versions that came before.
  • Audit trail, to permit the reconstruction of who did what to a document during the course of its life in the system.
  • Annotation and Stamps
  • Stress-Free Auditing

Document management systems today range in size and scope from small, standalone systems to large-scale enterprise-wide configurations serving a global audience.  Many document management systems provide a means to incorporate standard physical document filing practices electronically. These include:

  1. Storage location
  2. Security and access control
  3. Version control
  4. Audit trails
  5. Check-in/check-out and document lockdown.

Document management, while still recognized and utilized independently, it is also a common component found within an Enterprise Content Management environment.

 

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