Most companies do not know why document management is important. Did you know that many companies do a better job managing and securing their office supplies than they do their business-critical documents and files? It’s true. The electronic documents that are the very lifeblood of the modern business are all too often taken for granted. Document management has long been ignored by many companies, but that is changing fast.
Very few businesses take the time to consider the expenses that they incur on a daily basis because of:
- Time and effort wasted in locating documents amounts to a lot more than one would think. Recent research has indicated that nearly 10% of an average office worker’s day is spent trying to locate existing information and documents.
- Redundant effort necessitated because it’s believed that it is often easier to recreate something than it would be to try to find it.
- Time and effort involved in figuring out who has the latest version of a document, and recovering when various revisions overwrite each other.
- Unnecessary usage of network storage devices and network bandwidth, because the documents are dispersed everywhere across the enterprise, rather than centralized.
Important Resources
- The pain of not managing your documents
- Top Ten Reasons to use infoRouter
- EDMS Return on investment
- Top Ten Benefits of Document Management
If you ask "why is management of documents and information very important?" consider the alternative:
The risks of NOT managing your documents
Very few businesses think about the considerable risks that they expose themselves to:
- Security is applied haphazardly at best, which exposes important information to scrutiny by potentially inappropriate people.
- Critical documents are stored -- often exclusively -- on laptop computers that could be lost, stolen, or damaged at any time.
- Documents stored centrally on Windows network drives, once deleted, do not go into a recycle bin as commonly believed. They simply disappear, and must be restored slowly from tape backups (if you’re lucky enough to have those).
- No record exists of precisely who has viewed and/or edited a document. It’s therefore impossible to audit a business process to uncover mistakes or inefficiencies.
Consider the facts above and find out how you are affected by not having a plan in place to manage your documents more effectively.
Very few organizations have implemented a robust document management software solution that can deliver real results. Talk to Active Innovations about how you can vastly improve your efficiency in managing your business documents.