Traditional document management systems (DMS) allow organizations to use computer systems to store, track, and manage digital documents. They’re essential for companies that want to go down the paperless route. With a DMS, a business reduces the need for printing, resulting in less paper waste. In addition to benefiting the environment, reducing the use of paper results in significant monetary savings.
Cloud document management is the latest evolution in the traditional DMS. In this article, we explore what cloud document management is and examine three key benefits of implementing this solution in an organization.
Explaining Cloud Document Management
There is one key difference between a traditional DMS and a cloud-based one.
With a normal DMS, an organization must maintain in-house data servers for its digital documents. This means more money is spent on developing infrastructure and maintaining physical hardware. With cloud document management, the company enjoys all of the benefits of a DMS without the hardware component. Servers are managed offsite by cloud service providers, meaning any maintenance costs are built into the price of the service.
These reduced costs make cloud-based DMS more scalable. If your organization needs to increase its storage capacity, it only needs to change its plan with its provider. Similarly, a reduction in document management needs is easily handled via the cloud because the company doesn’t have to worry about keeping unused hardware.
Cloud Document Management –Three Key Features
Reducing costs is the main reason many organizations express an interest in cloud document management. The lack of physical infrastructure combined with going paperless can save a company thousands of dollars per year. The paperless aspect is particularly important because companies in the United States collectively waste $8 billion per year on paper management.
However, lower costs aren’t the only benefits of cloud document management. There are several more that make this solution preferred for organizations that handle large volumes of documents.
Feature No. 1 – Backfile Conversion Services
Switching to a document management system is straightforward if you already have digital documents. Those documents migrate easily to the DMS without any conversion work required. But using a DMS is more complicated if your company has reams of paper documents that it wishes to digitize. Scanning all of those files is a time-consuming task that you may not want to complete yourself.
At Docutrend, we solve this problem by offering backfile conversion services as part of our cloud document management package. This service involves us sending a team of professional document scanners to your location. These professionals make short work of your physical document scanning needs, ensuring paper documents are present in your new digital system.
But this is just the start.
As you may already know, most scanners create image files or PDFs when scanning written documents. The result is a file that you can’t search through in the same way you can search a text file. Using optical character recognition (OCR) technology, our backfile conversion service makes your scanned files searchable. OCR can interpret image-based documents to find key phrases and terms, enabling you to search the documents more efficiently.
Feature No. 2 – Document Workflow and Approvals
File approval is a key source of delay in many organizations. For example, you may have a marketing team that has created a new flyer for your company. Before that flyer can go out, it may require approval from several other departments. Without that approval, you risk releasing a document that contains inaccurate information.
This need for approval prevents your marketing team from acting as quickly as it otherwise would.
A cloud document management service can solve this problem using automated workflows that ensure documents instantly reach the people who need to approve them. Furthermore, a cloud-based DMS allows multiple employees to work on a document simultaneously. In the case of our flyer example, this means that legal and sales personnel can check the flyer as it’s in progress, allowing them to make suggestions and grant approvals on the fly. The result is a more collaborative (and faster and more accurate) document creation process.
Feature No. 3 – Security While Sharing
Real-time collaboration speeds up the document creation process. It also boosts internal security in several ways.
The most obvious is that using a cloud document management system allows you to manage access to a document. If you’re creating a document that contains sensitive information, you likely don’t want everybody in the company to be able to see it. Using access controls, you restrict the ability to view or edit that document to those who need it. As such, there’s less chance of unauthorized personnel viewing information they shouldn’t know.
Versioning is another important security feature of cloud document management services.
Every time a document is edited, a new version is created. However, you still have access to previous versions. This allows you to track every change made to a shared document to its source. From a security standpoint, this makes every approved user traceable, so your company can confront the offending party in the case of security concerns.
Go Paperless With Cloud Document Management
The cloud enhances organizational collaboration in so many ways.
Nowhere is that more evident than with cloud document management services. By leveraging the cloud, these services allow you to create shared documents with other employees. With the ability to check and edit documents in real-time, your people can grant approvals and tweak documents to ensure they meet all regulatory and compliance requirements. On a more general level, shared document access allows multiple people to make changes and additions simultaneously, resulting in faster document creation.
Beyond enhancing collaboration, paperless document creation saves your organization money on wasted paper. It also allows you to make the document creation process more secure. Finally, backfile conversion services give your company access to valuable information in a centralized location, allowing you to use that information to serve customers more easily.
Cloud document management offers cost and workflow improvements for your company. At Docutrend, we offer document management solutions to clients in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Speak to our experts today to find out how we can help you save time and money.