Running a small business is no easy feat. After all, roughly 20% of businesses fail within the first year of opening. But you’ve somehow managed to claw through that period and work is picking up. And now, you’ve set your sights on growth. While there are a few different avenues you could take, document management might not be something you’d thought of. And yet, it could be just the thing that allows your company to take off from a small business and become a true enterprise. Here’s how.
What Is Document Management and Why Is It Important?
In simple terms, document management outlines a set of processes and applications that dictate how your company handles various types of documentation. With that in mind, both depend on creating a central document management system (or DMS), typically a piece of software that the company will use to organize their data and documents.
At their core, modern document management systems work with both paper and physical documentation. While going paperless is probably one of the most common visions of modern businesses, reality might mean that you should take that vision down a notch. There’s still plenty of documentation that your office might need to keep in paper form, whether for storage or state filing. Still, that doesn’t mean that it should constitute the bulk of your work. In fact, it’s estimated that 45% of office documents are used once and discarded, making them prime candidates for digitization.
To that end, document management combines physical storage and management options, transformation options, and digital storage, sharing, and backup solutions.
How Document Management Solves Problems That Growing Businesses Face
Small businesses have a host of issues they need to take care of before they can truly shine. However, while implementing a DMS goes a long way to solving them, it can also introduce additional problems to fix.
Budget and IT Support Concerns
A small business typically doesn’t have the means and manpower necessary to create and maintain a large-scale document management solution, whether it is paper-based or online. The solution for this starts with understanding what exactly you need from a DMS.
Luckily, simple documentation solutions can start without a dedicated system, such as buying small filing cabinets and creating a bare-bones digitization pipeline. If you develop a proper strategy for how you should be dealing with your documents, you can look into what DMS will suit your company best.
After that, look into cloud-based service providers and software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms that specialize in digital file management. These often come with inexpensive basic packages that provide a modicum of customization at reasonable prices. With the basics covered, you can look into getting more features when your company grows enough to afford it.
Alternatively, you can consult a provider that can set up an on-premise solution. However, if you don’t get a subscription-based service that handles regular upkeep (which can be pricy and push it out of your budget range), you might get a system that needs much more overhead from you or dedicated support staff. That’s why cloud-based providers are typically better for smaller companies.
Best of all, providers take care of software maintenance and app security for you, precluding you from hiring IT specialists to build a DIY system.
Document Access and Sharing
After the pandemic swept through the world, the corporate world has been changed, and some of those changes have stuck. In particular, more people work remotely than ever before, with around 40% of the workforce expected to remain on hybrid or remote-only work schedules.
The prevalence of remote work has created another avenue for businesses to grow: using remote workers and outsourcing. But both of these options require documents to be shared entirely online. This creates another problem in how to track the documentation and ensure everyone is on the same page.
Modern DMS saves the day once again. Apart from storage capabilities, most modern solutions come with version control, sharing, and role-based access capabilities. This allows you to pick and choose who gets access to vital documentation and ensures that people stay up to date with the most recent revisions of paperwork they need.
Additionally, most DMSs filter and tag data through intuitive hierarchy-based folder systems, creating streamlined storage that looks similar to the paper-based filing used in the past. As a bonus, it works on a larger scale while having minimal physical requirements, improved efficiency, and comes with a nifty search bar. These can speed up document lookup and allow vital personnel to grab the documents they need in record time.
Workflow Management
One of the main benefits of using a DMS is its ability to store, tag, and route documentation properly. This allows every key person to get the most recent version of the document for review.
The implementation of the DMS can vary, but it can invariably improve decision-making and vital workflow pipelines. This is due to the reduced time needed to get vital documentation shared with key personnel, especially with delivery and view confirmations.
A modern DMS can also be set up with periodic reminders, allowing management to get notified about documents that are about to expire, contracts that need to be reviewed or amended, or a host of other time-bound files.
Decentralized Data Storage
In a traditional office setting, employees will typically use their computers for vital data procurement and management. However, without a proper document-handling strategy in place, all that information might stay on individual devices. Not only does that limit the company’s access to that information, but it creates a few security risks, from increased theft to potential data loss.
A DMS often creates a central repository for both paper and digital systems. Then, paper files are typically scanned and digitized to have a record of them preserved online. Digital files can be stored in a single location, either on a server the company owns (for a self-hosted on-premise solution) or one maintained by the provider (for cloud-based services).
With a bit of training on proper document management practices with the staff, your company can silo its vital documentation and data in a central, secure location. This improves file security but also greatly speeds up access and processing times.
Security and Compliance
While there aren’t any federal laws that require all companies to implement security strategies for their documents, industries or states often have regulations that do just that. Examples include the CCPA, the HIPPA, FINRA, GDPR, PCI DSS, various ISO laws, and more.
With all these in mind, creating and maintaining a DMS on your own or trying to learn how exactly to store and share documents can be a hassle.
A dedicated document management service provider often caters directly to companies in a specific subset of industries (such as healthcare, law, or finance), and their products need to abide by those standards. By extension, working with those providers means that your DMS will comply with all the regulations it needs.
Furthermore, document management is one of the most competitive modern industries, and providers will try to “one-up” others with more modern security measures and features. This typically means that you should expect, at the average, excellent results if you work with a professional service provider.
Grow Your Company by Working With the Best
It’s safe to say that document management has become practically a necessity in the online-oriented business world molded by decades of ready internet access. If you want to stay in line with the times, you need to implement modern systems that allow you to focus on running your business rather than searching through files.
Companies in Troy, Detroit, and Flint can do just that with Elite Imaging Systems. We have the tools, experience, and proprietary software that allows you to integrate document management into your business seamlessly, all the while maintaining platform-independent access to your vital data. To get started on crafting the perfect solution for your company, contact Elite Imaging Systems today.
