Environmental issues have become increasingly important to businesses as legislation increases, and customers take more notice of a company’s ‘green’ credentials when making purchasing decisions. In fact, a study by GfK Roper Consulting showed that 79% of Americans take a company’s environmental practices into consideration when choosing products to purchase. Companies are therefore working hard to reduce carbon footprints and meet their sustainability targets, and making changes to the way documents are sent and stored can be a good place to start.
Tag: EDMS
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How to select the right EDMS for your organisation?
Further to the post on what is an EDMS, we would like to also highlight what one needs to look at when selecting an EDMS for any organisation.
You will find a lot of EDMS applications available in the market today. These could range from simple applications that come bundled with scanners to software organisations. While every software has a claim on having the perfect match for your requirement, it is important that you take some simple steps that will help you arrive at the best match for your requirement thus reducing frustration.
Have a clear understanding of how paper is used, stored, retrieved within your organisation. How does the document originate, what is the process and what is the content that is involved? You could also involve other members of your organisation thus forming a task force that will go through different departments and come up with a detailed list of requirements. Alternatively you could also call in experts or vendors who will do this task for you. Based on your collected requirements, form a consolidated list of requirements which will aid your decision making process. You also need to come up with evaluation criteria so that you know the requirements which are “must haves” and those which are “good to have”.
During the evaluation, keep in mind the evaluation criteria and also keep in mind the flexibility of the software to scale up in case you decide to start at a departmental or workgroup level and later on ramp up to an enterprise wide deployment.
Remember, selecting the right system can transform your business and simplify the way it is done.
With contributions from Ashish Baby and Harshad Thakkar
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What is an Electronic Document Management System (EDMS)?
An ideal office is one which is clutter free and neat and clean. But how often do we see piles of paper on tables? Very often indeed. While we may try and store the important documents neatly, it means using expensive real estate to store these documents. And retrieving a particular document is a tall order. It calls for going through multiple files and multiple pages… Almost like finding a needle in a haystack. According to Gartner Research, on an average it takes 18 minutes to search for a document. Not only that, they also have found that on an average professionals spend 50% of their time looking for information.
So how does one over come this challenge? The answer is an Electronic Document Management System (EDMS). EDMS can change the way in which your business functions. Whether you are looking for a simple method to improve the way you handle important paper based documents or handling electronic files generated by users on their computer systems, an EDMS is able to provide various advantages for organisations of all sizes.
What does an EDMS entail?
Capturing – Using a good scanner, the first step is to transform the paper based documents also called hard copies into electronic format. There are software plug-ins that can help improve the quality of the scanned images (noise reduction) and can also turn upside down images which are scanned in the wrong direction.
Indexing – Once you have tens of thousands of documents scanned into the computer, tracking them and keeping them organised is the next challenge. Index fields or unique identifiers for each document or a group of documents shall be entered which will help in classification. This in turn saves precious time.
Retrieval – EDMS makes the entire process of retrieving the required documents very simple. One can enter the keyword search and the system will bring up one or more documents that match the criteria in a very short span of time. It is also possible to use a combination of keywords or even using Boolean method of searching.
With contributions from Ashish Baby and Harshad Thakkar