Document Management
Since paper was invented man has been trying to organize and bind related documents. Scrolls, books, binders, staples, and paperclips are all efforts to keep pages with related information together. This is becoming more difficult as we generate and print more pages every year. In addition to this government regulations (HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, etc) and efforts to meet quality assurance standards(ISO, Six-sigma) impact how business's and organizations store documents. Documents must be readily available yet secure. The information contained in them needs to be found easily and quickly while maintaining the original format and layout.
All of this and more can be accomplished easily with an electronic document management system. This is a system that converts documents to an electronic image and provides a defined method for the storage and retrieval of that document. This could be as simple as scanning documents into a defined folder structure as pdf's and naming them based on a specific piece of information. It could also be a full fledged commercial system with full text search, annotations, tagging, and a database to keep track of that information. What is important is that it meets the needs of your business.
When considering a DM System look for the following features:
- Ease of use
- Non proprietary file and storage format
- Security
- Easily backed up
- Original documents are not modified with annotations
- Full text search
- Customizable index fields
- Ability to populate the index fields automatically when scanning
- Track access to sensitive documents
- Import/export documents easily
If you would like to learn if a Document Management System can benefit you contact us!