Digital Document Management - A Brief Overview
Many companies across the world have already made the transition to digital document management from relying on paper-based documents, but many, many others haven't. This is mainly because they are either concerned with the disruption it may cause or in a lot of cases, they don't even know what it is or how it can help them.
Digital document management is a modern way of handling all of your company's documents on computer systems. This can either be on your computer's actual hard-drive, over a shared network or via cloud hosting. Digital document management is known and integrated because of its strong reputation with improving efficiency in the workplace as well as saving capital and space within the office itself. Read about Cloud Document Management, EDMS System, Document Workflow and much more.
Digital document management is usually brought in by companies that are dissatisfied with their current record management system or those who just want to improve the way they operate, usually needing to get their paper-based documents converted to suit the new system in the process. Often bulk document scanning companies will become involved in order to scan and digitise the paper documents. The documents can also be usually made to be totally text-searchable thanks to OCR technology and software and the documents are almost always indexed, a process where the scanned files are named after particular elements of the document which will make it easier to find once within the document management system, such as a client name, address or reference number.
Once a digital document management system is in place, staff are able to search for and find documents on their computer rather than having to go through filing cabinets and drawers in order to find particular documents and references. This leads to an improvement in efficiency because of the time saved in going through these processes which means more work can be done in the working day than usual.
As well as this having a digital system leads to a number of other benefits such as space saved thanks to the paper files becoming obsolete, environmental issues such as less ink and paper consumption, plus extended cost savings on document storage if your company is using such a service. Going digital also brings forth the opportunity to live a life within business without paper which has been termed 'the paperless office'. This means that, for the most part, you can live without the need for paper.
Although some integrate digital file management as a way to improve efficiency around the business, others integrate to keep up with the latest technology as this can be very important for some companies, particularly in the world of technological innovation, either for showing their green credentials or for showing how they are always keeping up to date, or both.
Digital document management is also at a point right now where it is accessible for more than just the larger corporations. For the most part, the software is made to be as simple to use as possible which makes it easier to get more people to accept and work with the system, whereas prior to around 5 years ago, the software was difficult to use and very technical.
