Section One: Solving Business-Critical Problems with Document Management Solutions

Document management solutions can help you deal with the rapidly-increasing burden of creating and maintaining your organization’s paper archives. By reliably managing and protecting the documents that support organizational processes, document management solutions increase efficiency, support profit-building activities and provide a balance between security and accessibility.

Document Management Solutions: Save Time

A PriceWaterhouseCoopers study reports that the average worker spends 40% of their time managing non-essential documents, while IDC estimates that employees spend 20% of their day looking for information in hardcopy documents and that, 50% of the time, they can’t find what they need.

With a document management solution, instead of searching for information, knowledge workers spend time meeting the needs of your current customers and acquiring new ones. Your staff spends their time more productively instead of spending their days searching for information or filing documents. A document management solution can help you save time by:

• Eliminating lost documents that must be recreated and re-filed.
• Answering information request immediately, eliminating call-backs and phone tag.
• Responding quickly to auditors' requests for information.
• Speeding document-handling workflow by enabling automation.
• Immediately locating documents and highlighting essential information.
• Cutting time spent copying and distributing documents to staff, branch offices and outside contacts.

By implementing a document management solution, you stop spending your time handling paper and start spending your time doing what you do best—serving your clients.

Document Management Solutions: Increase Profitability

While implementing a document management solution can result in up-front costs, it does lead to long-term savings. In fact, a recent IDC study pinpoints the return on investment (ROI) of document management solution at less than one year, with a five-year ROI of 404%. Half of the organizations studied had payback within six months. In fact, a quality document management solution can deliver a rapid return on investment without overtaxing IT resources.

Document management solutions increase profitability by reducing costs and by increasing revenue. EDI Group, Ltd., estimates that implementing a document management solution results in a cost savings of $1-5 per document, while Gartner, Inc., estimates that a document management solution can reduce overall document-related costs by 40%. There are the benefits of reduced overhead, lower costs for both on-site and off-site storage, reduced costs of regulatory compliance and, often, the elimination of staff positions or reassignment of staff to more strategic positions.

Because a document management solution helps you better utilize your time, you generate more revenue. You spend more time meeting with clients and closing deals, offer the value-add of a quicker response time to customer queries and provide quality customer service which ultimately leads to more referrals.

Overall, lower costs and increased revenue result in enhanced profitability and greater business value. The cost of implementing a document management solution is ultimately an investment in your future organizational success.

Document Management Solutions: Increase Efficiency

Put the right tools - and the right information - in the hands of the right people. From an intelligent document search that helps customer service answer questions more quickly to workflow automation that maintains the pace of business processes and alerts managers to employee action and inaction, a document management solution can help your organization increase productivity and efficiency.

Reduce misfiling, document retrieval time and photocopying costs with a single system that manages paper and electronic documents, physical records, multimedia files and e-mail. Using one platform to manage all your organizational information allows you to apply organizational records policies and procedures consistently, regardless of document format.

Peelle Tech estimates a 20% time savings based on filing and retrieval efficiencies, eliminating misfiling and workflow efficiencies. Increased efficiency, as well as greater staff productivity, can save up to 6,000 hours annually, or 2.4 full-time staff positions.

Document management solutions can help your organization increase productivity and efficiency with:

• Intelligent search methods that support searching with whatever criteria you have available.
• Streamlined document distribution and improved accountability with automated workflow routing and notification.
• Reduced labor and clerical mistakes with automated OCR and indexing.
• Management of your entire organizational archives from your desktop computer.
• Fast document distribution with Web and CD publishing.

A document management solution provides your staff with immediate access to the information that allows them to make better decisions about issues that impact your organization’s bottom line. With a document management solution, your employees will be able to support their work processes, work more efficiently, collaborate more effectively and make better-informed choices - dramatically increasing productivity while accelerating the pace of business and your clients satisfied.

Document Management Solutions: Increase Communication and Collaboration

As more and more organizations adopt document management solutions and replace filing cabinets and microfilm with digitized images, they still face the problem of getting information to users who don’t have access to the system.

Document management solutions make it easy to share documents electronically with colleagues and clients over a network, whether that is network-attached storage (NAS) or a storage area network system (SAN), on CD or DVD, or securely over the Web. Sharing paper documents usually entails photocopying, and sharing microfilm requires conversion to paper, but with digital documents, you can view the same documents simultaneously.

A quality document management solution should:

• Create CDs with built-in viewers and search capabilities, so documents can be viewed and searched on any PC, regardless of whether document management software is installed.
• Allow you to distribute CDs royalty-free.
• Present a consistent face to customers and the public with a customizable interface that matches your Website.
• Balance access and security, assisting you in retaining strict control over which documents are available to staff and the general public.
• Work with documents on a wide variety of Internet browsers, operating systems and hardware.

Your staff searches for information, acts on it, moves it and archives it every day. This process, with its manual searching, faxing, photocopying and distribution, is costly and time-consuming. The inefficiencies of this process divert your staff from the crucial business of making productive use of the information.

Document management solutions with an automated workflow component deliver more efficient work processes. A workflow solution reduces costly paper handling with intelligent document routing and saves time and money by reducing photocopying, hand delivery and repetitive dragging and dropping. A quality workflow solution doesn’t treat your staff as stations along an assembly line, but as responsible workers whose time is better spent on more productive tasks than making copies.

A workflow solution allows your organization to:

• Design rules-based routing systems to streamline document-handling procedures.
• Copy and move documents using routing services and your computer network.
• Automatically notify staff and supervisors when certain events take place.
• Monitor user activity, guaranteeing efficiency and project completion while enabling enhanced staff efficiency reporting.

Workflow solutions give you the power to recapture lost hours, reduce your overhead expenses and increase profitability, all while improving the level of service you provide to your customers.

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