It can be challenging to manage all of your business’ data, especially when you have a heavy reliance on physical paper documents rather than using a digital document management solution. Here are the steps involved in implementing one and how it can benefit your organization.
Capture and Create Documents
First, you’ll need to get your currently used documents into your document management system.
Creating New Documents
In this step, you’ll make new documents, anything ranging from reports and memos to spreadsheets or presentations.
Capturing Existing Documents
The process of capturing existing documents can be tedious and time-consuming, as it requires you to scan physical documents or create digital documents from sources like your email, servers, or cloud storage.
Classify and Index Your Documents
This can often be a major hangup for businesses implementing a document management system, but we’ll walk you through how you can do it more easily.
Categorize Your Documents
Assigning categories to your documents or metadata tags can make classification and retrieval easier.
Index Your Documents
When you need something from a book, you look at the index. The same can be said for your document management system. An index that uses metadata, keywords, and the like will be massively beneficial for faster searches.
Store and Organize Your Documents
What technology are you going to use to store and organize your documents? We recommend you work with North Central Technologies to identify what you need for this task.
Pick a Storage System
An appropriate storage system will help you organize your systems, whether they are physical filing cabinets, network drives, or an electronic document management system.
Decide How to Organize Your Documents
You’ll want to use a consistent and intuitive folder structure to organize your documents in a way that makes sense for your business.
Ensuring Access Control and Permissions
With so many threats out there that want to steal or harm data, you’ll want to keep strict control over your network.
Access Rights Must Be Defined
You should set up a permissions system for who can view, edit, or delete documents, as well as identify important user roles and permissions to ensure important data is protected.
Security and Encryption Are Important
Encryption is critical to the safety of documents, especially while they are moving from one system to another.
How Documents Get Retrieved
How much time do you think gets wasted on document retrieval? Make it easy with the following practices.
Use Search Functionality
Digital document management grants powerful search functionality, allowing users to find documents based on the information you have provided to the system, including keywords, metadata, and full-text search.
Add Filters and Sorting
Filters and sorting features can help narrow down results to find exactly what you are looking for.
Build Workflows and Collaboration Structures
With businesses requiring more flexibility than ever before, a document management system allows for this type of work to proceed unimpeded.
Tools for Collaboration
Document collaboration is easier with document editing solutions and communication platforms with integration enabled.
Workflows for Automation
Automating workflows helps ensure that approval processes, notifications, and routing are as efficient as possible.
Data Backup and Disaster Recovery
You never want to be in a situation where your data is lost or unavailable. If you do find yourself in such a situation, solutions like data backup and disaster recovery are essential.
Take Backups Regularly
If you schedule backups to be taken every so often throughout the day, you can minimize data loss from hardware failures and other disasters.
Test Your Disaster Recovery Plan
Developing and testing a disaster recovery plan will ensure your business’ continuity, including your document management system, even when things seem tough.
Working With Compliance and Retention
Since many companies have deals or contracts with the government or other industries, they will have specific mandates placed on them in terms of regulation. This extends to your document management system.
Compliance
You should implement and enforce document retention and disposal policies that are in line with your legal and industry obligations.
Audits
Audits can help you keep track of who accesses documents, as well as changes made to them.
Monitor and Maintain Your System
Keeping your systems in check requires monitoring and maintenance, just like any other technology infrastructure.
Perform Routine Maintenance
It’s critical that you periodically update and review your document management system to ensure that all settings and access permissions are working properly.
Monitor Your Systems and Reports
Monitoring and tracking tools can help you ensure that systems are performing to specifications, and the reports they generate can help you make sure your document management system is working as intended.
Train Your Users
Finally, training your employees will be the biggest way to get the fastest return on your investment and the benefits that come from your new document management system.
Training
To make sure your team knows what they are doing, provide training and support for your new system. This goes for any new technology, really.
Feedback
User feedback will help you make adjustments and make the system easier and better for everyone to use in the long term.
Improving Your System
To improve your document management platform, you can revisit your practices and how they work with your other IT systems.
Evaluate and Adapt Your Approaches
Based on user feedback and your business needs, you can make adjustments that will help your business make the best use of your system.
Making massive changes to the way your business organizes documents can be intimidating, not to mention costly. This is why North Central Technologies makes it easy and affordable for you! To learn more, reach out to us at 978-798-6805.
