Electronic Document Management has been widely accepted as the
practice of creating and storing documents. What lacks common
acceptance is the need to retrieve, archive and sort documents
as per requirements. With real estate costs climbing feverishly,
and businesses process becoming more and more complex and
demanding, the need to implement an integrated electronic
document management
system is growing by the day. Realizing this opportunity,
several global software vendors have come up with their document
management products to facilitate this process and more and more
organizations are implementing this system in today's world.
It I important to understand what exactly electronic document
management refers to and why is it so important to
organizations, small or big. Electronic Document Management
System refers to a system whereby documents are created,
modified, stored, distributed, secured and retrieved with the
help of software tools.
An organization must ponder several times and answer several
questions before it goes about implementing a document
management system. Some of the questions that must be asked can
be:- (1) Are your documents uniformly marked and stored for
"finger-pointed" retrieval. (2) Can you easily gather related
documents that are physically distributed at different places.
(3) Can your personnel easily locate documents created or
modified by others within the organization, regardless of the
format and method of creation of the documents. (4) How long
does it take to locate the desired bunch of documents. (5) Can
you find a specific type of similar documents over a date range
quickly and effectively. (6) Can you track back the person
responsible for handling any particular document.
Answering the above questions can easily help you take a
decision. Also, to arrive at a conclusion, one must keep in mind
the following characteristics of a suitable document management
system. (a) Should convert your office into a paper-less office
by electronically keeping track of all documents. (b) Should
seamlessly integrate with your existing manual document
management methods. (c) Should help your business grow faster by
ensuring fast and accurate availability of information. (d)
Should help you analyze the efficiency of co-workers by keeping
track of documentation work allotted to them.
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