Using document management software (DMS) creates reduced operating expenses and, therefore, business continuity. However, it also creates business continuity through data backup and redundancy should a natural disaster occur and destroy a business’s on-site information.

Aligning DMS Vendor Innovation with Organizational Purpose

Although DMS strategy and software are developed to adapt to business demands, they will also grow independent of organizations’ demands—meeting needs of which organizations are not yet aware.

It’s for this reason that when a DMS vendor adds a new feature to its product spread that organizations should explore how it can benefit them before dismissing it.

In fact, most DMS vendors do not update their software before considering the future needs of its buyer base. That’s why it’s worth exploring how your business can adapt to future challenges through DMS technology.

Why Document Management Turns Information into Strategy

As the marketplace diversifies, DMS development teams will update solutions to not only help businesses manage information effectively, but also to develop information management strategies.

A combination of software and strategy, within the next 5 years, DMS will include a diverse set of road maps for information management strategy—which will greatly empower knowledge workers.

For instance, Infosys, a business technology and consulting firm, notes that one of the biggest changes DMS will face within the next several years is its permeation throughout the organization, particularly beyond the points of mere implementation and use—turning it into a more “complete business solution.”

Why Document Management Software Increases Workflow Transparency

Few business processes are given a visual road map in organizations, making them difficult to implement, remember, and use. However, DMS features like workflow, for instance—create a traceable process road map. This keeps employees accountable for specific tasks and helps system admins identify roadblocks to project completion as they arise.

DMS also centralizes processes for offices with multiple branches, including the external auditors who oversee them. Within the next decade, it is possible that document management software vendors with satellite and remote access will have created an established road map for auditors, which can be replicated across many different industries.

This trend will also shift organization’s awareness, making them focus more on content collaboration rather than the management of transactional content, which will also increase demand for document management software use.

How Document Management Enables Enterprise-grade Tech Sufficiency

As DMS technologies become more sophisticated, so does their ease of use. Given that some DMS vendors sell on an international basis, customer support in the industry demanded an overhaul not too long ago.

The language and cultural barriers to providing effective customer support overseas and across continents has posed significant barriers. However, the increased usability of DMS offerings has reduced the problems associated with this issue, and users of these technologies are becoming increasingly self-sufficient.

The Future of Document Metadata in DMS

Metadata’s role in the DMS market will gain an even stronger foothold as organizations look to retrieve higher volumes of content and information based on what the content contains, not where an employee has stored the content. This makes the content storage and retrieval process simpler and more automated.

For organizations striving to grow considerably within the next five years, metadata-driven DMS with Zonal OCR/Natural Language Processors (NLPs) and other file retrieval add-ons will be the best options as growing organizations accumulate information rapidly and without control.[/cz_title][cz_gap height=”30px” id=”cz_62034″]

Today’s CFOs and CIOs are always on the lookout for ways to reduce operational costs. Any change that helps their employees find documents they need more quickly, for example, could help your team become more efficient – reducing your operational costs.

Digital document management (sometimes called enterprise content management or ECM) cuts costs by bringing together a number of concepts, technologies and strategies to reduce or eliminate tedious, time-consuming activities that don’t drive revenue. Often, ECM is able to automate previously manual tasks, such as maintaining financial compliance records.

Here are the top 5 ways document management can help reduce operational costs.

1. Storage Costs

When you switch from paper-based processes to digital document management, you don’t need to purchase expensive file cabinets or pay to store and maintain the hard copies of your business records. As a result, you’re able to free up office space for more productive uses than storing paper archives.

2. Copying and Printing Costs

By moving from paper to digital documents, there’s no need to create multiple copies for inter-office distribution or to file the same documents into a variety of departmental filing systems. A master copy of the electronic document is stored in the system’s centralized repository, where it’s available to all authorized users. Similarly, there’s no more need to create carbon copies of documents sent to customers and store them in-house. The result is that you spend far less time and money on printing, supplies and equipment.

3. Personnel Time

Document management offers significant improvements in efficiency, resulting in less personnel time spent storing and retrieving documents. Tasks that took minutes or hours with a manual, paper-based system takes seconds with a digital document management system. Since all documents are stored in a centralized location, there’s no more time wasted while waiting for colleagues to provide requested documents.

4. Business Process Costs

Using the digital workflows available in a document management system helps you streamline many business processes in accounting, sales, customer service and HR departments. Depending on the department, optimizing these workflows could lead to faster payment collection, lower purchasing costs, higher consumer satisfaction or increased employee retention.

5. Security and Disaster Recovery Costs

With a digital document management system, it’s easy and inexpensive to automatically back up your documents to other secure locations, helping to ensure business continuity in the event of a natural disaster or security breach.

This eliminates the costs of expensive offsite storage for paper backups or creating special disaster-proof archiving rooms. If you need to retrieve these documents in the future, you just click a button – there’s no longer the expense of having documents delivered from off-storage facilities.

If your organization still relies on hard copies and paper-based processes, you’re probably spending too much on basic operational costs. when you consider these five ways digital document management could help you reduce those costs, there’s a great opportunity to improve the bottom line and implement efficient processes that help your company grow.

The content of this article was provided by DocuWare.

Les Olson Company is an authorized DocuWare dealer. DocuWare is an excellent Document Management software that helps businesses get a handle on their document workflows.[/cz_title]

Lacerte DMS users should switch to DocuWare.

Intuit recently announced that its document management products, Lacerte DMS and ProSeries DMS will be discontinued this year. If you currently use Lacerte DMS or ProSeries DMS, you will need to find an alternative to managing your documents electronically. While the makers of ProSeries have recommended SmartVault DMS as a suitable alternative, a little bit of research will reveal that your best choice is actually DocuWare! Let’s compare the two:[/cz_title][cz_gap height=”25px”]

Here’s Why it’s Easy to Switch:

1. We can export your documents from Lacerte DMS and ProSeries DMS and import them into DocuWare for you.
2. We offer a variety of purchasing options, including monthly payments for added flexibility.
3. We will customize DocuWare to fit your business processes so you don’t have to change your processes to fit DocuWare.
4. DocuWare is extremely easy to use and requires very little training or experience.

Why do we use DocuWare?

We don’t just sell DocuWare, we use it every day in every department of our business. After doing extensive research to find a good document management solution for our business, we determined that DocuWare was the best product available. After using it in our own office, we were so impressed that we wanted to make it available to all of our customers!

About Our Team:

Les Olson Company is committed to providing our customers with the best possible customer service and support. Our Software Solutions team is comprised of I.T. professionals and document imaging experts. Each holds the CDIA+ certification, which is a highly-regarded and established qualification for document management expertise. In addition, each of our team members are Microsoft Certified professionals and networking/I.T. professionals with various industry certifications.

We work closely with you to make sure that your DocuWare system integrates well with your business processes. We also provide you with product training and installation to ensure that the software is properly installed and users fully understand its uses and functions. Our product experts may also be consulted at any time after the purchase to assist with troubleshooting and additional training needs.

For all these reasons, Lacerte DMS users should switch to DocuWare![/cz_title][cz_gap height=”25px”][cz_button title=”Get a DocuWare Consult” btn_position=”cz_btn_block” btn_effect=”cz_btn_fill_right” sk_button=”font-size:17px;color:#ffffff;font-family:Assistant;background-color:#ba0230;border-style:solid;” id=”cz_59913″ link=”url:%2Fproducts%2Fsoftware%2Fdocument-management%2F%23quote|||” sk_hover=”color:#ffffff;background-color:#e9283b;”]