In today’s times, most of the businesses worldwide are operating from remote environments. In normal scenarios, the business documents and paperwork need to be arranged in proper files, which require a significant amount of office time. And in work from home, it becomes even more difficult, as the employees cannot team up under a single roof. In such conditions, it is essential to provide them with a gateway to save their documents and easily connect to their colleague’s paperwork. It is where Electronic Document Management Systems matter.
Many businesses, however, virtual reality animation still prefer to use their conventional system of document storage and sharing. Do they often keep asking why they need the EDM services? So, in this blog, we will discuss why businesses need document management systems in detail.
Benefits of EDM Services for Businesses
It is a no-brainer that Electronic Document Management Systems make handling and sharing documents easier for businesses. But, it is not its only benefit. They have some other benefits as well, like:
- Reducing the cost
- Expanding accessibility
- Facilitating edits
- Increasing productivity
- Enhanced security
Let’s discuss these benefits in detail.
Cost Reduction
We all are aware of the cost of maintaining paper-based documents. If your business is still maintaining those large clamp files, you probably know how much extra cost is required to print, edit, and maintain those documents. And here we are not even considering the additional office space you need to store the documents. And with each passing year, as the number of papers keeps increasing, the storage space also demands enlargement.
But, all these costs get eradicated once you start storing your business documents into the electronic document management systems. The EDM service providers customize the file size and layout to arrange all the documents in their client’s preferred structure. It enhances the ease of storing the documents while reducing the costs simultaneously.
Accessibility
With the growing importance of accessibility, most companies are now bound to make their documents accessible to employees with disabilities. It helps to reduce the discrimination against people with disabilities in the workplace. But, adding accessibility features to all the printed documents is quite a challenging task. Whereas, if your company stores the documents in EDMS, it becomes easy to make them accessible.
Nowadays, most EDM services providers add accessibility features like alt texts, high contrast colours, etc. Hence, it helps to make the office papers accessible to disabled employees.
Multiple Editing Options
When your business stores documents on the document management systems, all the project members can view the document and work on it. It makes editing very easy and faster. Also, one does not have to make multiple copies of the same document. All the employees can access the single soft copy. It reduces both printing costs and documentation time.
Reducing Time Lag
In a recently conducted survey, 50% of the employees had said that handling paper-based documents consume more than 40% of their office time. And this 40% of the time, which accounts for more than 3 hours out of 8 hours in a day, goes waste without any production. So, if the companies migrate to document management systems, the work becomes easier for their employees.
With the help of appropriate meta tags, and distributed file locations, finding a document in the EDMS is a matter of just a few clicks. As it saves a lot of valuable production time, the productivity of the organisation increases, thereby reducing time lags.
Document Security
All the business owners have faced situations when an important document gets lost in the heap of not-so-important papers. And many times, we cannot find it altogether. Keeping such important papers securely is important for businesses. Otherwise, there might be chances of data leakage, giving undue advantages to competitors.
The well-advanced EDMS developed by reputed EDM service providers offer multi-layered security for every data uploaded on the portal. These document management systems minimise the chances of data theft.
Important EDMS Features that Matter for Businesses
Now that we know the major benefits of using electronic document management systems, let’s take a look at the most important features that businesses must add to their EDMS.
Compatibility with Work Portal
Won’t it be great if the documents can be accessed directly from the work portal? Well, it can be made possible if your company portal gets integrated with document management systems. That is why the reputed EDM service providers offer document management systems that are fully compatible with the client’s work portal. This will reduce the need to shuffle between different platforms at work.
Automated File Indexing
Indexing every page of larger docs manually is a problem. Nowadays, the EDM service providers add some special tools using which, the uploaders can auto-index the pages. This makes work a lot easier. Also, it increases the efficiency of file organisation, as the index will make the basic content visible to everyone. So, businesses can have an idea of the file content without actually opening it.
Metadata Tagging
Metadata increases the visibility of the content. Now, what does it actually mean? Whenever your employees search for a document in the Document Management System, they use certain keywords like the name of the topic, the name of the author, etc. The DMS then matches the search terms with the metadata of each file, to deliver the best-suited files. It means the quality of the search results depends on the accuracy of meta tags added to the files.
The professional EDM services providers design efficient meta tags for clients’ documents. They also design tools that auto-generate the tags for the uploaded pages. These meta tags help to arrange the documents in proper sub-folders, align the different pages of a folder, along with increasing the visibility of the pages.
Offline Viewing and Editing
It is not always possible to work online for an employee. Especially when working from home, we all face network issues. In such cases, the production may suffer if the EDMS cannot function offline.
Most of the EDM services providers add offline document viewing and editing facilities. The edited versions get stored locally in the device for a certain time, and get auto-uploaded into the server when the internet connectivity becomes normal.
Security Audits
To ensure that the documents locked inside the document management systems are secured, the EDM service providers offer enhanced security features to the businesses. They conduct repeated security audits to make sure that there are the least chances of penetration.
Thus, your business documents will not fall into your competitor’s hands anymore. Also, the security measures will prevent even internal data leaks.
Conclusion
Well, all the business people already know the importance of document management and data security. EDM services will just help to handle the documents more securely and efficiently. With the presence of features like security locks, metadata tools, indexing tools, etc, electronic document management systems help to manage the business data quickly and in a far easier way. The employees spend less time with files and more time with work. Even, the cost of printing thousands of paper, and storing them in large document rooms vanishes instantly.
In short, we can say that the EDM services save money, effort, and time for your business. But, not all EDM service providers are proficient enough. You should choose them diligently for the best results. With Acadecraft, you get all of these and more!
With an experienced in-house team of technical experts, EDM specialists, and business minds, we offer tailor-made EDM solutions that best suit our clients. Our client support lines remain open 24×7 for instant redressal of client issues.
