Six Reasons Why Your Growing Enterprise Should Adopt A Document Management System

SO, YOU’RE EXPANDING.

If your enterprise is at the cusp of a growth curve, here’s what you should expect.

Like a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, you can only grow as fast as your most inefficient critical processes allow. Sure, scaling up can be an exciting phase in a company’s trajectory. But scaling troubles are a bit different from teething troubles. They don’t simply resolve with time.

Growth exposes bottlenecks. It will add inefficiencies to internal communication with increasing team size. You might need to add administrative verticals you didn’t previously need. Your old well-oiled early processes will be tested and may need a complete overhaul. And the cost of mis-steps along the way will be greater than you’ve ever faced before.

But all of these are happy headaches, because…

FOR A GROWING ENTERPRISE, EVERY CHALLENGE IS AN OPPORTUNITY.

As you traverse a scaling path, your organization will be well served by establishing the core technology needed to run a mature business. A document management system, for example, is a system used to capture, track, manage, store documents generated by an organization, and is a must for being able to reach your full business potential. While mostly known as a way to reduce organizational reliance on paper, its capabilities are much greater, and intelligent managers know it is an important cog in the wheels of organizational progress.

SOLVE FOR GROWTH, WITH A DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM.

A sound document management system will ease some of the most critical challenges of a growing enterprise. Below are six of the most definitive reasons a growing enterprise must consider a document management system as part of its core technology stack

1) Enhanced Scalability

Adding volume to any business increases the pressure on its moving parts. The burden of disorganised document management leads to inefficiencies at process-critical nodes. In fact the problem is widespread.

In the Definitive Guide To America’s Most Broken Process a survey of American employees reports the following – 49% said they have trouble locating documents, and 43% have trouble

with document approval requests and document sharing, and 33% struggle with the document versioning.

Besides, it also increases susceptibility to error, human or otherwise. Which adds to the topline costs of your business. Smoothly functioning document management will enable your enterprise to add volume at minimal marginal cost.

2) Higher Time and Cost Savings

The workflow automation capabilities of a document management system enables you to automate repeatable tasks like capturing information, indexing and sorting documents, repetitive manual data entry, and many more. Also, its searchability in granular detail significantly reduces the wastage of productive time in locating documents and retrieving information.

An IDC White Paper observes with a few fair assumptions that an enterprise employing 1,000 knowledge workers wastes $48,000 per week, or nearly $2.5 million per year, due to an inability to locate and retrieve information.

The improved enterprise-wide process efficiency is certain to reflect in the bottom-line of your growing enterprise

3) Improved Collaboration and Communication

As the size of your team increases, the ability to communicate and collaborate effectively decreases. Removing roadblocks to collaboration and communication is critical in the performance of teams in particular as well as enterprise-wide cohesion as a whole. Cloud-based document management solutions can bring together a distributed workforce to collaborate on any document in real-time, while reducing delays in review and iteration. Making a reality of the common phrase: “access your information from anywhere at any time”.

4) Easier Regulatory Compliance

As your company increases in employee size and revenue numbers, its compliance burden is bound to increase. A document management system enables easily retrievable, comprehensive and authoritative audit trails of every piece of documentation with just a few keystrokes. This even includes detailed version histories of documents. Additionally, well-indexed records retention and archival of documents ensures easy reference for quality compliance. This is essential for digitally reproduced documents to be accepted as evidence in any court dispute. Thus a document management system that adheres to international electronic archiving norms is a must to be able to meet data privacy and legal validity requirements.

 5) Better Operational Agility

A document management system integrated with the other core business systems such as CRM and ERP helps your growing enterprise deploy automated decision-making at scale. Things like: “When an invoice is received from ACME products, route it to the CFO for electronic signature, then send copies to the operations line managers, the sales team, and archive it in the ACME file”, can be encoded and automated without having to repeat the manual decision-making each time. Simple examples like this are exponentially multiplied in a growing company, and a document management system eases the burden. Leaving your key management to consider more important decisions, an improved enterprise decision management makes for quicker and more efficient decision making, and thereby better operational agility. This can help the company achieve a distinct competitive advantage.

6) Necessary Security and Permissions Management

As your enterprise grows, the cost of lapses in data security increases. This is sometimes a hidden risk factor that often goes unaccounted for. It may be difficult to estimate the dollar-worth of your data, until the breach has occurred. A document management system, with secure file sharing and permissions management not only enhances data security, but also makes any misuse traceable.

OPTIMIZE, OR DIE.

Enterprise growth without document management is like accelerating a car with its emergency brake on. In an intensely competitive digitally transformed marketplace, sustainable growth of your enterprise will depend largely on your competitive advantage. In a world where the rate of technological adoption in every business process across industries is increasing exponentially, you don’t want to get caught playing catch-up.

A document management system is simply a must-do for any growing enterprise. It will enable your growing enterprise to unleash the power of creativity and innovation with an underlying structural foundation of order as a bedrock.

The good news is that the majority of mature businesses have realized this and have a document management system in place. However, a large number of organizations both large and small are still unaware of what they are leaving on the table because they have yet to implement a proper document management system. Unfortunately for them, time is not on their side and in the long run it may be impossible for them to reach their full potential without a document management system in place.

So when you finally reach the on-ramp for the scaling highway, in which group will your enterprise be?