The need to allow a quick and easy flow of information among employees, customers, and vendors is driving companies towards adopting a Document Management System.
With the right information at the right place and at the right time, there’s a major reduction in inefficiencies as companies work to meet growth objectives. In a situation where over 21% of daily productivity loss can be attributed to document issues, the need for such a tool is so crucial.
Simply explained, a document management system (DMS) is a software used for organising, securing, capturing, digitising, tagging, approving, and completing tasks with your business files. Everything that happens to documents within an organisation.
DMS like MaxFiles and other ones can handle the large amounts of paper flowing into a business, which means you and your team will get to save a lot of hours that could have gone into documentation work, like professionals who spend 18 minutes of every hour searching for documents.
So, its value is not even in question. Whether you use digital documents already, or you’re just about digitising them, you need a document management system to manage a large data pool.
But before you decide to purchase a DMS, here are some features you want to look out for, to ensure you get a full handle on your documents.
Storage On the Cloud
It’s okay to question any document management system that doesn’t have an option to store your company’s information on the cloud. This is supposed to function as a central document repository, where you and your team can store important files, as you need to.
So, start by asking for how, where, and when you can access information on the DMS. For some document management system providers, files may be hosted on your digital devices and interconnected, but for others like MaxFiles, your files are on the cloud and accessible from any browser or device.
You also want to find out if there’s any cap on what and how much information you can upload on the DMS. Be clear on your storage and upload needs, and put the product features side-by-side them.
Document Digitisation Features
This is most applicable if you have many documents that are still in paper format. Find out if the DMS provides scanning and digitisation features that will enable you to move all important documents onto the new storage.
Document digitisation helps reduce your reliance on file cabinets, and prevent probable loss or destruction of your data. To ensure you get a feature that makes this easy, confirm the availability of technologies like optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent character recognition (ICR) in the document management system.
Functional Search Capabilities
One of the reasons for getting a document management system in the first place is to ensure easy accessibility to your documents. So, it’s crucial that your DMS comes with an efficient search function, to allow you to find your documents much faster.
This means paying attention to indexing features of the DMS. It should have a proper naming and categorisation methodology for documents, such as you can use when searching for documents, without having to scrape A-Z each time.
Document Editing
You shouldn’t have to download documents, to use on a separate software, each time you need to edit them. Find out of the DMS has a built-in document editor that allows making corrections and revisions, right there on the document management system.
This should also allow creation and storage of new documents, and their arrangement in the correct folder.
And, by extension, a DMS should have a comprehensive version control system, which will indicate changes to documents and those who made them. That way, you get a full view of how a document has progressed over time, and who’s making what changes when.
Permission Sharing
Among other exciting features, Document Management Systems have gained popularity for their capabilities for document access control within an organisation, and even when relating with clients/customers. So, that’s another feature to look out for.
The DMS should allow admins to share permissions with other employees – very essential to keep the data integrity, prevents deletion or needless movement, while also ensuring a seamless move of documents through the approval hierarchy.
Supportive of Different Document Formats
A functional DMS should have capabilities to store day-to-day and more common documents like spreadsheets and word documents, but that shouldn’t be all. Other formats like videos, images, PDFs, and other ones should have the same easy storage and access as word documents.
It’s just really better to have a single document management system that can truly be a central information storage tool, without the need for a similar storage in separate places for different formats.
Conclusion
Document management systems are helpful for keeping information, and achieving a seamless sync across the organisation.
But then, it only makes sense when you use the right one, with as many features and capabilities as you need.
MaxFiles is an industry-leading document management system, with these features, and a lot more. It also comes with workflow automation tools to allow efficient collaboration among employees, and a lot more capabilities that make for an effective document storage solution.
Find out more about MaxFiles, and how the software helps make document management a lot easier and more efficient. Talk to our team here.
