7.5 Signs your Document Management Needs an overhual

Ineffective document processes have serious consequences for your business.

Find out how to examine your current processes for inefficiencies, security risks and unnecessary costs.

1. Employees can't easily access the documents they need: Hours wasted- weekly average per employee: 3.5 hours to search but not find the documents. 3.0 hours for recreating content 4.3 hours to manage document approval searching for and analyzing information both consume 24% of the typical information worker's time(9.5 hours per week, respectively.

2. You're spending a fortune on physical storage: Without effective document management or enterprise content management, an employee spends an average of 18 minutes searching for a document. More than 70% of today's business would fail within three weeks if they suffered a catastrophic loss of paper-based records due to fire or flood.

3. You can't see all the pieces of business process: A document management system stores all of your documents in one place, including scanned documents , emails and attachments from outlook, data from your accounting system, invoicing and reports.

4. You're search options are limited: The average employee spends 30% to 40% of their time looking through email, paper documents, shared hard disks and filing cabinets to find information they need to complete their tasks.

5. It's difficult to secure confidential and sensitive documents: Document management also helps you to prevent documents from leaving outside your company. Depending on the situation, you may choose to block access to a document outside your company's network, and prevent users from exporting or copying that document. If your security is breached, document management provides an audit trail that makes it easier to figure out who accessed the documents and possibly take legal action.

6. You cross your fingers when a big storm threatens: If you are using a paper-based system, it's hard to implement a solid disaster recovery plan. Making a second set of your business records and storing them in a separate location would be prohibitively expensive and difficult for most businesses. With a digital document management system, however, you're covered even if your whole building burns down. You still have a digital back up of all your documents offsite with which to start rebuilding your company.

7. An audit would bring your organisation to a standstill: You need the ability to document your compliance with records retention guidelines. Digital document management enables you to fulfill these requirements much easier.

7.5. You can't access the information you need while traveling: As many more companies embrace remote employees and use mobile devices to conduct business, it's now expected that you have mobile access to your business information wherever you are. it's difficult to retrieve a document when you are traveling and your paper file cabinet is 3,000 miles away, but that's no problem when you're using a digital document management system.