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Posted on Oct 28, 2009 in Records Management News

http://www.manufacturing.net/Article-Taking-The-Paper-Out-Of-Paperwork-10270 9.aspx

Tak­ing The Paper Out Of Paper­work By Stephanie L. Jones, Mar­ket­ing Direc­tor, eBridge Solu­tions Manufacturing.Net — Octo­ber 27, 2009

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It’s inevitable. Elec­tronic doc­u­ment man­age­ment will soon be the only prac­ti­cal and accept­able way to retain, retrieve and dis­trib­ute your crit­i­cal busi­ness infor­ma­tion. But don’t worry; this doesn’t have to be a daunt­ing endeavor. Thou­sands of man­u­fac­tur­ers have learned to lever­age web-based tech­nol­ogy to switch pain­lessly from paper-based fil­ing and stor­age to an elec­tronic doc­u­ment man­age­ment solu­tion. Con­sider it a busi­ness imper­a­tive, since con­tin­u­ing the sta­tus quo of paper-based infor­ma­tion shar­ing will make it nearly impos­si­ble to com­pete suc­cess­fully in today’s global economy.

Going paper­less starts with con­vert­ing paper files into well-organized dig­i­tal con­tent that’s instantly acces­si­ble from any com­puter with Inter­net access. This is accom­plished through imag­ing or scan­ning. Doc­u­ments are then indexed, stored, shared, retrieved, and dis­trib­uted much more effi­ciently. Many doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tems also enable you to elec­tron­i­cally trans­fer other files such as Word doc­u­ments, Excel spread­sheets, JPG files and even e-mail cor­re­spon­dence directly into your elec­tronic fil­ing cab­i­nets for per­ma­nent reten­tion and easy retrieval.

Like most man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies, you prob­a­bly have many cab­i­nets full of paper which occupy valu­able square footage in your office or ware­house. Retriev­ing infor­ma­tion involves flip­ping through file fold­ers on your desk, or going to the cab­i­net, find­ing and pulling files, mak­ing copies or send­ing faxes, then re-filing every­thing in the right place. These few min­utes quickly add up to expen­sive man-hours.

How much more pro­duc­tive could you be (and how much space could you save) if every doc­u­ment you needed was right at your fin­ger­tips – acces­si­ble in sec­onds with just a few clicks or key­strokes? Even depart­ments like Sales, Human Resources, Com­pli­ance or Accounts Payable and Receiv­able can store their paper­work electronically.

Ben­e­fits of Elec­tronic Doc­u­ment Management

There are many advan­tages to going paperless:

* Time sav­ings. With doc­u­ment man­age­ment, you can have instant access to files. Scan doc­u­ments once and never print them again. View doc­u­ments with­out leav­ing your desk, which means cus­tomers get answers imme­di­ately. While you are out of the office, you can eas­ily access orig­i­nal files through any web-based doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem. * Money sav­ings. With a doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem, you can reduce the amount of paper you buy and vir­tu­ally elim­i­nate postage, pho­to­copies, fax machines, couri­ers and off-site stor­age. You can also decrease your paper con­sump­tion costs because you can directly e-mail or fax doc­u­ments instead of print­ing and mail­ing cum­ber­some paper files. Using this tool, you and your employ­ees will quickly become more effi­cient and pro­duc­tive — giv­ing them more time to focus on other tasks — which will save, if not make you, money. * Space sav­ings. The aver­age 5-drawer file cab­i­net takes up 12 square feet of space. Eight file cab­i­nets occupy almost 100 square feet. What would you do with an extra 100 square feet of prime office space? How much rent are you pay­ing for the space occu­pied by your file cab­i­nets? * Improved com­mu­ni­ca­tion. By plac­ing e-mail cor­re­spon­dence in the same elec­tronic fil­ing cab­i­net as con­tracts, prod­uct spec­i­fi­ca­tions, invoices and other doc­u­ments, it will be faster and eas­ier for your employ­ees to look at client infor­ma­tion and cor­re­spon­dence. No more putting peo­ple on hold. Most doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tems will inter­face with your cur­rent con­tact man­age­ment soft­ware, so you won’t need to store files in both places. * Improved com­pli­ance. MSDS are a per­fect exam­ple for this ben­e­fit. One Detroit-based man­u­fac­turer has begun to house their MSDS infor­ma­tion online. “We started stor­ing our MSDS data online using our doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem to ensure the lat­est infor­ma­tion was avail­able to all of our employ­ees, regard­less of where they are located,” the plant man­ager explained. “With chem­i­cals in mul­ti­ple loca­tions through­out our facil­ity, stor­ing the infor­ma­tion this way made more sense than try­ing to update a large num­ber of man­u­als every time a new chem­i­cal was intro­duced or an updated MSDS came out.” * Bet­ter backup. Since so many man­u­fac­tur­ers use their ware­house space to house con­tracts and orders that aren’t used, but need to be retained, there is a real dan­ger that those records could be lost if a piece of equip­ment caught on fire or if the sprin­klers went off. By scan­ning and stor­ing paper­work elec­tron­i­cally, those threats are reduced and you’ll have cre­ated a back up of all your crit­i­cal doc­u­ments. A disaster-recovery plan is an added bonus. * Go green. Going paper­less is a great step toward going green. Paper pro­duc­tion neg­a­tively impacts our envi­ron­ment and drains nat­ural resources. As more and more doc­u­ments arrive at your desk elec­tron­i­cally, you can use a doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem to auto­mat­i­cally add them to your web-based file cabinet.

Four Things to Con­sider When You Go Paperless:

There are four top­ics you should dis­cuss with any doc­u­ment man­age­ment provider you are con­sid­er­ing: Secu­rity, Ser­vice, Scal­a­bil­ity and Support.

Secu­rity Now more than ever, secu­rity must be at the fore­front of any doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem. Cus­tomer and ven­dor infor­ma­tion is highly con­fi­den­tial and you have a pro­fes­sional respon­si­bil­ity to pro­tect people’s pri­vacy. Stor­ing doc­u­ments on a remote server is safer than putting files in a cab­i­net with­out locks.

Doc­u­ment man­age­ment providers should be stor­ing data using state-of-the-art encryp­tion tech­nol­ogy and need to be pre­pared to enhance that secu­rity as newer tech­nol­ogy becomes avail­able. Keep in mind, it is impor­tant that sim­i­lar encryp­tion tech­nol­ogy be employed to pro­vide secure data trans­mis­sion; think online bill pay from your bank.

Another com­po­nent of secu­rity is data backup because infor­ma­tion must always be recov­er­able. Phys­i­cal stor­age sys­tems are vul­ner­a­ble to loss from fire, theft, wind, water, and van­dal­ism. Ide­ally, data should be stored on redun­dant servers in at least two geo­graph­i­cally sep­a­rate data cen­ters and backed up regularly.

You should also receive a monthly encrypted CD from your provider with all your pre­vi­ous month’s scanned images to keep in your office. This three-tiered level of infor­ma­tion backup pro­vides a fool-proof way to com­ply with records reten­tion require­ments as well as dis­as­ter recov­ery and busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity policies.

Ser­vice Advances in com­puter sys­tems have afforded us instant access to infor­ma­tion on the Inter­net. A doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem must be equally as respon­sive, even when trans­mit­ting and stor­ing mil­lions of doc­u­ments. Today’s Internet-based sys­tems can eas­ily meet or exceed the per­for­mance of a local server-based system.

Be mind­ful, too, of how eas­ily your doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem will inte­grate or inter­face with your cur­rent busi­ness man­age­ment soft­ware appli­ca­tion. This will greatly increase its ease of use.

Scal­a­bil­ity As your busi­ness grows, so will your need to pro­vide doc­u­ment access to new employ­ees. Be sure to choose a sys­tem that is com­pletely scal­able to meet your chang­ing busi­ness needs with­out hav­ing to spend more money. Some doc­u­ment man­age­ment providers will charge per work­sta­tion or user. This might not fit into your bud­get, so plan accordingly.

Sup­port Internet-based soft­ware sys­tems pro­vide a real value to their cus­tomers in that every user is on the same ver­sion of the soft­ware. In other words, the ven­dor only has to sup­port one ver­sion of their soft­ware so they can do their job extremely well. Since the occa­sional tech­ni­cal prob­lem or pass­word reset request is sure to arise, be cer­tain that tech­ni­cal sup­port is included in your cost.

An Internet-based doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem pro­vides a paper­less solu­tion for man­u­fac­tur­ers or busi­nesses in any indus­try. Just remem­ber, your paper will con­tinue to grow until you scan it and shred it. Sim­ply put, the sooner you let go of the paper the sooner you can expe­ri­ence the many ben­e­fits of elec­tronic doc­u­ment management.

Stephanie L. Jones, MBA, is the Mar­ket­ing Direc­tor for eBridge Solu­tions, a web-based doc­u­ment man­age­ment com­pany located in Tampa, Florida. She can be reached at sjones@eBridgeSolutions.com.

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