It’s a brand new year and the time has come to reevaluate business practices and introduce some improvements. If you’re considering document management strategy enhancements, there are several things you may want to do right now.
Reduce Printing As Much As Possible
Do you really need reasons to digitize important documents and stop printing at the office?
While getting rid of paper-based documentation in one go isn’t the easiest task, taking steps to eliminate unnecessary printing will definitely pay off.
Introducing more thorough digitization as a part of your document management strategy is more affordable and readily accessible than ever before. You can choose among various solutions, some of them ideally suited to the needs of your business.
It’s also a good idea to come up with internal policies and protocols aimed at reducing mindless printing. Providing employees with incentives to keep documents digital instead of printed on paper will be essential to slowly transform corporate culture and establishing new universal practices.
Reducing printing will eventually become a natural process. If you keep important communication digital and you move to a cloud-based archive, you’ll see the need for printing dwindle in time. All it takes is a proactive approach and the selection of the right digital document management solution.
Determine What Additional Document Sets You’re Going to Digitize
Document digitization is a process that consists of multiple steps. It all starts with document scanning, followed by the creation of a digital archive and the selection of the right cloud-based document management system.
Chances are that some of your documents are already used in a digital format. Others, however, may still be kept in a filing cabinet. Start by working on a brand new document management strategy that focuses on some additional digitization.
Contracts and employee documentation, for example, will often be kept on paper.
It may be a good time to start thinking about digital, electronically-signed agreements and digital employee files. Both of those can save time and they’ll be much more effortlessly accessible for reference purposes in the future.
These two document categories provide just an example of the ways in which your digital document management strategy can be extended. Choose such an expansion on the basis of your professional field and workflows. It’s a good idea to digitize documents that take up a lot of space or that are utilized in your practice often enough.
Make Automation an Important Part of Your Document Management Strategy
How much document management is being handled by employees? If all document creation, editing, and processing tasks are being completed by your workers, you’re missing a huge opportunity to increase productivity and make the most of the workforce.
If you haven’t done so, you should consider more thorough automation.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have long moved out of the science fiction realm. These technologies give document management systems and other corporate solutions a chance to “learn” and become more personalized on the basis of individual client needs.
Through the selection of the right document management system, you can create automatic workflows and sequences aimed at eliminating the burden of handling tiresome and repetitive tasks. These often take up a lot of time and can lead to human error. If a machine is using a sequence to handle such tasks (like document indexing, for example), the risk of error is going to be much, much smaller.
Get Your Document Management Strategy to Be Versatile and Scalable
The past two years have shown us some important things about the way we do work.
For a start, the Covid-19 pandemic illustrated how we should be prepared to expect the unexpected. Until it happened, many companies refrained from introducing any form of remote work. Today, it’s become pretty much the norm for a vast array of enterprises.
Remote work gives employees a lot of freedom but it comes with some challenges.
To address those, make sure that your document management infrastructure is both scalable and versatile. It should be easy to upgrade/downgrade or integrate with other solutions that your business is counting on.
Software rigidity is a thing of the past. No enterprise can afford lots of downtime for migration or upgrade purposes. Cloud-based systems make it possible to utilize the resources that are required right now and to move up a notch immediately when such a change is needed.
Think of Security Risks!
As document management systems are becoming more advanced, so are security threats.
In the years to come, hackers and cybercriminals will come up with new ways to attack digital archives and attempt to gain unauthorized access.
You should have a strong security policy in place. Getting it backed by the right digital technologies will give you a fairly impenetrable archive.
Get employees on board and educate them about common security risks. Human error is one of the most common causes of data breaches. If people are taking a mindful approach toward data protection, chances are that all of the right safeguards will be put effectively in place.