What is Document Management? An Essential Guide for Strategy, Systems, and Solutions

Document management is one of the best investments that a business can make. Many businesses don’t think of the consequences that bad document management can have because it isn’t deemed a critical business task. In today’s digital world, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Businesses are creating vast amounts of documents, contracts, files and more that need to be easily accessed. The time and effort wasted by tracking down documents can be considerable if documents are poorly managed. For example, documents might be managed in multiple different cloud storage systems, file drives, or in emails instead of in a centralized location. If these and other document storage systems are not managed efficiently, employees can spend an excessive amount of time searching for the latest version of a document they need.

On the other hand, good document management has many advantages including proper information storage, document retrieval and disposal of documents according to established company processes and procedures. An efficient document management system, also known as dms, helps ensure that governance and security best practices are followed. Introducing a document management solution or electronic document management system is vital to overall efficiency and the ease of information access.

Companies like Canon that provide document process management outsourcing services look to integrate technology, processes, people and data to seamlessly manage documents throughout their useful lifespan, from creation through archiving. The overriding goal is to maximize the utility of documents as critical business digital assets, and minimize document-related risks. Strategic outsourcing enables an enterprise to design and execute a sound program customized to meet the organization’s business objectives at, potentially, a reduced cost and lower risk.

The best outsourcing partners work with their clients to seamlessly integrate technology, processes, people and data to manage document assets throughout their lifespan of value. Typically, the IT department and business stakeholders start with an overall information governance framework. From there, areas of the business where critical documents are created and stored are evaluated, retention and destruction policies established, and a view is created of all crucial information assets to be maintained, stored and retrieved across the enterprise. For example, Canon solutions span print management, technology management, comprehensive mail services, imaging solutions, records and information governance, and professional document assessment services. Additionally, Canon project teams use advanced business performance management software and benchmarking tools to support document best practices and innovation for the future.

The best way to manage documents within your organization is to identify the critical business objectives you want to achieve. This can include boosting employee productivity, improving response times to customers, safeguarding your business against disruption, and optimizing information governance and security. Developing a document management strategy using best-in-class technology will help achieve these goals.

An effective document process management strategy consists of five key components:

• Business Driven: Focused, centralized and aligned with business requirements
• Integrated: Unified across media, digital formats, enterprise functional areas and locations
• Policy Based: Clear, consistent and enforced
• Risk Management: Oriented to minimize compliance, litigation, financial and operational business risks
• Continuous Improvement: Innovation focused, utilizing performance management and benchmarking tools to identify and apply best practices

Businesses are rife with hardcopy and electronic documentation, including mail, contracts, applications, invoices, claims and more. If handled manually, processing, tracking and delivering this correspondence to stakeholders can be inefficient and costly. Fortunately, document management presents an ideal opportunity to leverage automation and digitization to deliver substantial benefits such as:

• Cost Savings. When you automate manual tasks, it helps centralize some of the most mission-critical information in your organization. It also increases processing velocity while decreasing resource allocation for basic and repeatable tasks. Automation reduces the errors in document management that have major downstream impact in departments like risk management, customer service and business intelligence.
• Intelligent Data Capture. Unstructured data accounts for up to 80% of your overall business information assets, and a great deal of this data exists in documentation. Automating and digitizing document management allows for intelligent document capture, which extracts this unstructured data to make it actionable. This data can also be seamlessly integrated into workflows and reporting across the business, creating faster insights and driving better collaboration.
• AI and Machine-Learning Ready. Digitizing your documents automatically doesn’t simply give structure to your unstructured data. It also vastly improves overall data quality and velocity, meaning your critical information can be further enriched with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning capability. This means that automated document management is a core pillar of your overall digital transformation and a true creator of new business value.

Streamlining document management systems is not a core competency for most organizations. There is, however, no cookie-cutter strategy for finding the right document management services provider. Success will be dependent on matching your company’s unique needs and growth initiatives with a provider that has the expertise to deliver on your vision for the future. It is important to keep this point in mind because choosing the wrong partner can hinder rather than help. Here are three factors to consider when selecting your partner:

• Seek Flexibility. An integrated delivery model is a critical feature of the right services provider. Rapidly growing, transforming businesses must partner with providers who can meet those evolving needs and provide maximum adaptability — whether you need document management onsite, offsite or offshore.
• Value Expertise. Your document management needs are complex, and the right services provider will understand the unique circumstances of your organization and your industry. Look for a partner who has worked across industries, especially those with a high level of controls and compliance needs like financial services, insurance and healthcare.
• Leverage Straight-through Processing. The right managed services provider can perform data validation and enrichment routines to update extracted data. This can eliminate the need for manual verification and validation steps downstream.