15 Guaranteed Document Management System Benefits

Photo of author
Written By Haisam Abdel Malak
Spread The Love

Document management system benefits are enormous. It is a cost-effective way of storing and retrieving documents and manage records lifecycle. These systems allow you to easily find the document that you need when you need it.

Document management system benefits are improving your overall business operations, cutting costs, increasing productivity, securing your documents, improving collaboration, and, most importantly, putting you on the path to a fully digital workspace.

A document management system (DMS) is a system used to track, manage and store documents and reduce paper. Most are capable of keeping a record of the various versions created and modified by different users (history tracking).

There are many reasons to invest in a DMS. The most important reason is likely to be the increased efficiency and productivity that it can bring to an organization.

A document management system can help to streamline processes, reduce the need for paper records, and make it easier to find and retrieve documents. This can save time and money and make it easier for staff to do their jobs. Other benefits of a document management system can include improved security and compliance and reduced environmental impact.

In this post, we will discuss the key document management system benefits that can improve your business processes (#14 is my personal favorite; don’t pass it up.).

Check out this article if you are looking for an open source free DMS.

What are the benefits of a document management system?

One of the most important advantages of electronic document management system is that it helps to reduce the cost of storing and retrieving documents. In addition, they help to improve the efficiency of an organization by providing easy access to documents and reducing the time required to retrieve them.

Another benefit of document management systems is that they help to ensure the security of documents. This is because the components of document management system track and control the access to documents. This ensures that only authorized personnel can access the documents. In addition, document management systems also help to ensure the integrity of documents.

Last but not the least, they help to improve the productivity of an organization. This is because DMS helps to streamline the process of creating, storing, retrieving, and sharing documents.

The key document management system benefits are:

1- Less physical storage

One of the most important document management system benefits is the ability to digitize your documents thus decreasing the physical storage needed when dealing with paper documents and helping to become a true paperless office.

Storing physical records necessitates a lot of storage space, maintenance, cabinets, and so on. All of these costs will be reduced to a fraction of what they were before the transition to a digital world.

According to a study, physical document storage took up nearly 15% of the overall office area. And, on average, office space in the United States costs $285 per square foot. At that amount, that’s a lot of money to spend on document storage alone.

In today’s digital world, digital document archiving is far less expensive and more convenient.

OVER 4 TRILLION PAPER DOCUMENTS IN THE U.S. ALONE and growing at a rate of 22%, or roughly 880 billion paper documents a year

Source: Coopers and Lybrand

2- Reduce operational costs

Another great example of the top document management system benefits is the ability to reduce operational and storage costs.

Modern businesses are constantly looking for ways to decrease their operational costs and moving away from paper documents to digital and implementing a system will help achieve this goal.

A DMS, when correctly deployed, may help organizations never lose a document again, discover documents faster, protect documents, and share documents between departments and peers more quickly.

Employees spend 8.8 hours per week searching and gathering information, rather than creating it.

Latest studies show that it costs around $20 to file a document, $120 to locate a misfiled document, and $220 to replace a lost document.

These expenses are much reduced when a search feature is included in your document management platform, and document retrieval is straightforward and quick.

3- Promote better version control

How many times have you discovered that another colleague has overwritten your most recent edits to a document? or did you make a business choice based on an earlier version of a document?

Document version control is a crucial functionality from the list of document management benefits provided, and without it, your business would be in disarray.

One of the most significant benefits of adopting a system is that it always ensures that you are working on the most recent version of the document; concurrent alterations to the documents are not permitted; in other words, when someone needs to update a document, it should be locked.

Furthermore, it assists in the automated generation of version numbers (minor and major) depending on established parameters.

I strongly recommend reading the article below for additional information on version control.

Master Your DOCUMENT VERSION CONTROL in 5 Minutes (theecmconsultant.com)

4- Improve security

Most organizations agree that one of the most important document management system advantages is creating a strong security architecture to secure digital documents.

Document security is a major topic since missing information or having sensitive information exposed to the public may have a significant influence on a company’s overall success rate.

A variety of causes might cause paper documents to fall into the wrong hands, be misplaced, or even be destroyed. Digitized papers, on the other hand, will want specific and distinct handling in order to be properly kept and maintained.

A reputable solution would often have a plethora of capabilities to handle the whole lifespan of your documents security, from encryption to watermarking, to applying digital right management or restricting access to only authorized roles.

5- Better collaboration

DMS facilitates collaboration, visibility, and accessibility. As a result, it improves collaboration both internally inside a business and externally with stakeholders.

Most solutions offer a variety of methods to collaborate, both easy and complicated.

Employees may easily collaborate by sharing a link to the document, commenting on it, and taking action. Users may collaborate in real-time, redline, and annotate the document attachment for enhanced collaboration.

What is Collaboration: Why Is It Important? (theecmconsultant.com)

6- Easier access

Employees may now work from nearly anywhere in the globe, and your firm must enable instant access to business documents. Gartner says that professionals spend 50% of their time searching for information, and on average, take 18 minutes to locate each document.

One of the most significant document management system benefits is its ability to provide requested documents to users from the palm of their hands.

7- Improve regulatory compliance

Another great example of document management system benefits is the ability to improve compliance with a variety of laws and regulations.

A solid system will assist the company in remaining compliant with rules such as HIPAA and ensuring that documents are preserved in accordance with a clearly defined strategy.

8- Streamline document-centric processes

Document management and digitization are two of the most significant criteria for the effective adoption of a digital document workflow.

The majority of businesses rely on hundreds, if not thousands, of documents to carry out their daily operations. These documents are often sent between departments, workers, patients, and suppliers for approvals, signatures, and changes.

Using a document management system to simplify document workflows may have a significant benefit on your company’s operations. This study shows that the majority of employees surveyed point to broken internal processes across IT, onboarding and administrative functions.

9- Improve document indexing

One of the most important document management system benefits is the ability to allow retrieval of documents in a fast pace thus helping employees reduce time wasted when searching for documents.

Document indexing is the practice of tagging documents with certain attributes so that they may be easily searched for and retrieved later.

THE TYPICAL ENTERPRISE WITH 1,000 WORKERS WASTES $2.5M TO $3.5M/YEAR searching for nonexistent information, failing to find existing information, or recreating information that can’t be found

Source: IDC

Every organization is different, choosing what indexing criteria to employ is a vital choice for getting the most out of your new digital data.

10- Enhance data capture

Among the top document management system benefits is the ability to automate and improve data capture.

Some market solutions include a sophisticated data capture module that allows for the extraction of critical information from a scanned document during the digitization step (document imaging).

The capturing process is empowered by AI capabilities to get the most accurate results.

What Is Data Capture and Why It Is Important? (theecmconsultant.com)

11- Integration with other systems

When documents are saved in a DMS, they may be accessed via services by other business line applications.

That’s a huge advantage if you need a document to go into a new form or need permission after it’s been saved in your system.

For example, many businesses continue to rely on email for document sharing and collaboration, and the majority of well-known systems feature connectivity with email platforms for automatic document archiving.

12- Enhanced search

Among the top document management system benefits is the ability to locate documents in a matter of seconds!

Most market solutions include robust and intelligent search features, allowing employees to search documents based on previously collected information, metadata, and information contained inside the attachment.

19.8 % of the business time – the equivalent of one day per working week – is wasted by employees searching for information to do their job effectively

 Interact Source

13- Better backup

We’ve heard many stories about businesses losing important documents due to natural catastrophes, fires, and other incidents.

A DMS, with capabilities such as centralized storage, digitalization, digital archiving, and so on, allows improved digital preservation, backup and recovery of documents in the event of any unanticipated incidents.

14- Audit trail

In my opinion, one of the most important document management system benefits is the audit trail, which allows management to see at any time who accessed the document, who edited it, how many versions it has when it was last updated, and so on.

The ability to manage DMS documents during their lifecycle is critical. Viewing the entire history of all operations being done is one of the most important moves. This will allow you to see who read the DMS document, made improvements, downloaded the attachment, and so on.

15- Going green

A DMS reduces the need for paper in your office, making it more environmentally friendly. With DMS, you save over 3 trillion trees every year. A green office is a place of employment for future generations.

What are two key benefits of using document management software?

There are two key benefits of using document management software: it provides a central location for all the documents in an organization and simplifies the process of collaboration and knowledge transfer among team members.

Which is the most important element of document management systems?

The most important element of a document management system is its ability to store and retrieve documents. DMS helps organizations save time and money by locating documents faster.

Leave a Reply

Discover more from Information Management Simplified

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading