Why use Document Management in your Business?

Introduction
Perhaps you have heard that document management software is very time consuming to put in place and manage properly, or that it is too expensive for smaller to medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Maybe your staff is telling you that their current manual systems work ne; that everyone is familiar with them and that they have grown with the needs of the business. Perhaps those employees dont accept change easily. Or you may worry that technology is changing so fast that as soon as you invest in a document management system, it will be obsolete. So, is document management just too difcult to incorporate into your organization? The adoption of document management systems has certainly been slower at the SME-level than in the multinational enterprise, but this is changing fast. Document management products have lowered in cost and have become easier to deploy, with most commonly used features now not requiring special installation and conguration. The number of business documents in smaller companies may be many times fewer than at multinationals, but most SMEs have a number of key business requirements that can only be properly satised by deploying a document management system.

... most SMEs have a number of key business requirements that can only be properly satised by deploying a document management system

Improved Customer Service

Competition between smaller organizations, their peers and bigger companies has never been greater, and increasingly that competition is based on the level of customer service provided. A smaller organization must offer outstanding customer service when it is competing with a larger competitor, due to the latters ability to invest far greater sums in developing its products and services. If the smaller company can move the battleground for winning the business to the quality of customer service provided, then it should be able to thrive.

I have a copy of your purchase order on screen and I can see from our delivery note that we sent the wrong goods. I am sorry: Ill arrange for the right product to be sent out to you immediately.

To provide better customer service, any company must give its employees fast and straightforward access to the right information for their work. This has led to a growth in the use of document management in SMEs to give good access to key documents such as contracts and supporting documents such as correspondence, nancial documents and sales paperwork.

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Greater employee efciency and satisfaction

There is nothing more frustrating for an employee than having poor information sources and inefcient processes. Such failings add extra costs for the business through wasted employee time. The dissatisfaction that results from these failings also affects productivity levels and can ultimately increase employee attrition rates, with the associated cost of recruitment and training.

A properly implemented document management system can help with employee efciency and work satisfaction by: giving authorized personnel faster access to the right version of a business document the rst time, making document approval processes easier and more transparent, and encouraging everyone to adhere better to company policy and procedures, allowing others to pick up tasks more easily when covering for illness and vacation

My manager approves my expenses claims quickly - even when he is out of the country on business. You will nd the latest version of the plan on the intranet, together with everyones comments.

Dealing with Growth and Change

Growing SMEs often have all the challenges of change management without the time and money to tackle it as a distinct problem. Document management systems help with the enforcement of proper procedures, resulting in a consistency of process and outputs that are much harder to achieve using paper based processes. The resulting sense of order helps an organization cope with change on other fronts that arise from growth. Each year brings more red tape for SMEs particularly in sectors where businesses are subject to separate legislation from government or rules set by a regulatory body. The law makes various demands on all US businesses in relation to keeping records, such as the need to retain liability insurance policy details, nancial records, and tax lings. Many SMEs have responded, perhaps inappropriately, by keeping copies indenitely of all documents likely to be required by legislation to be retained for a period, rather than trying to understand the subtleties of the law and its varying retention requirements for different types of documents. However, the ongoing costs associated with ling and storing paper are such that this stay legal approach can only remain economic through the use of an electronic ling and retention system (i.e. document management).

Compliance with Legislation and Regulation

Stronger Cash ow and Better Protability

Document management systems should bring direct nancial benets which justify their cost, with a surprisingly powerful return on investment. The increased efciency document management brings should result in faster payment cycles, additional sales revenue, reduced staff costs and less wastage on paper, postage and storage space. Your business already has le servers and email, so what extra would a document management system bring? Sadly, the humble le server and private disk drives are usually the friends of jumbled folders and lost les. There is little to mark each document in a folder beyond its lename, when it was stored and where. So, it can be hard nding the right document again, particularly when there may be multiple editions of it with different naming conventions.

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Meanwhile, some users of email hoard while others ruthlessly delete. This is such a personal medium that there is rarely consistent use or ling of emails between individuals, let alone within whole departments or companies. When someone is off sick or on vacation, all too often their email system is not understood by others or even accessible to them, so important tasks must await their return.

10 Ways Document Management Helps

Document management systems help tackle these failings: 1. Everything in one place Document management systems bring with them collaborative tools. Now, a project team can have all the documents they are working on in one shared workspace, with the benets that email brings in terms of time shifted and distance working, but without its problems of mislaid messages and inappropriate recipient lists. Instead, everything the team needs can be found in one place with everyones comments included, together with announcements, blogs and hyper link cross-references to other relevant les, workspaces or sites. 2. Correct versions of documents Versioning is a feature of document management systems that allows for the latest and previous versions of a document to be kept together such that normally users access the latest published edition, but selected users can also be given access to earlier versions and newer pre-release versions of a document. The result? It is the right version of a form that gets completed. Colleagues comment on the latest published edition of a document and not earlier, outdated versions. Customers get the correct set of terms and conditions. 3. Thorough, rapid search Google has got us all to expect rapid internet search. Now desktop search tools such as the one built into Microsoft Windows Vista are getting us used to full text personal search to nd things stored on our own computers. The next logical step is enterprise search to search across all the servers in a business. Document management systems typically include enterprise searching by content as well as by keyword, nding only those documents that users have rights to view. Many nd this an invaluable time saving tool. 4. Handle all types of documents throughout their life Once congured, a document management system can do all the hard work of looking after documents through their natural lifecycle. It may convert documents le formats to help ensure accessibility in the future for example PDF/A, the archive version of PDF les, will be readable in decades to come, whereas old word processor le formats are already causing difculties. The document management system can control who can access a document and what each person can do to it at each stage of its life: creation, revision, publication, archival, and deletion. 5. Consistent Filing System Document management systems are inherently multi-user systems and require the same consistency in their use as any shared system in order to be effective. But, unlike le servers which have grown up alongside desktop computing, a document management system is explicitly introduced to a business as part of process change, and therefore it can be established with department or company-wide ling system from the outset.

...the benets that email brings in terms of time shifted and distance working, but without its problems

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Zetadocs White Paper: Why use Document Management in your Business?

Permission settings and audit features can be used to help ensure everyone sticks to the dened ling structures and processes. 6. Support for Team Working on and off-site Paper can only be in one place at one time, and thats typically sitting in a central le or someones tray. However, web access and VPNs (virtual private networks) can securely extend companies networks out over the internet and give online access to business documents from all over the globe. The introduction of a document management system brings with it support for collaborative working on and off-site, meaning that edits and approvals can be conducted from afar whether thats at a clients premises, in public places, working from home or hotel, or even when traveling. 7. Reduced Storage Space and Costs Many businesses have more paper than they have space to store it, so documents have to be sent off-site, where they are less accessible and incur storage charges year in, year out. Disk storage takes dramatically less space (if, indeed, a business chooses to host its own servers) and the ever falling costs of media make documents even cheaper to store on line. 8. Secure, Audited Access Document management systems offer a ne granularity of control over the level of access to les for each person, job role or group of users. Some may be given full rights to add, edit, delete, and congure, others a subset of these rights or no access at all. Unlike paper or le servers, it is possible to track exactly who did what and when. The result is a degree of control and security that satises the needs of just about every SME. 9. No Lost, Destroyed, or Tampered Records Whatever the ling system, some documents get led wrongly. The snag with a paper based system is that it is then virtually impossible to nd those documents ever again. Document management systems encourage the ling of documents under several headings, which means, they are easier to nd again, even if one of the headings is entered incorrectly. Some headings can be entered automatically (such as the date of ling) and there is always full text search to retrieve the truly errant document. System backups mean it is unlikely that records can be destroyed and the combination of permissioning, audit logs, and backups, make tampering difcult and virtually impossible to do without leaving tracks. 10. Integration with other IT Systems Increasingly document management systems are being integrated with other IT systems so that users can look up supporting paperwork for a nancial transaction recorded in the accounting or ERP system, or for a sale entered into a line of business system such as a travel booking service, insurance broking system, or CRM package. There is integration with case management systems, patient records software and with stock control. In each case the need to link between the structured data in a database and the unstructured data in the document management system exists because everyday business life is full of both structured and unstructured information with a need to switch quickly from one to the other.

Business documents are scanned in at head ofce so that we can access them at the other ofces or when off-site. Its quicker than the post and now documents rarely go missing.

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First Steps Solve a Specic Problem in One Department

It is usually over ambitious to try to introduce a document management system for use throughout a business from the outset, and the limited number of IT personnel in a typical SME makes it an unrealistic proposition. Its better to pick out a specic problem in one department rst and solve it using a product that is capable of being rolled across the company one step at a time. For example, the nance departments in most businesses consume and generate more documents than most other departments. Each day there are internal purchase requests to be processed for the orders to be sent to suppliers, with the associated delivery documentation, invoicing and payment paperwork expected in due course? Then, on the sales side, there are quotations, sales orders, order acknowledgements, picking lists, shipping notes, sales invoices, and statements of account and chasing letters to get payment. There may be stock and production documentation to be produced and communicated internally or booking conrmations to be sent out. Each business is different, but in the nance department, plenty of paperwork is the norm. So it may be a suitable place to start.

Its much better to pick out a specic problem in one department rst and solve it...

The Do-Nothing Alternative

Choosing and installing a document management system is not something to be taken lightly. It needs careful planning for success. So, is the do-nothing alternative a viable one?

Some companies elect to scan paper documents, storing the resulting graphics les to le server folders rather than a document management system and having a le naming convention that helps users nd documents again. It can be effective, but it needs strict discipline covering its use to ensure consistency of ling. Other companies stick to paper, working on the basis that if it aint broke, doesnt x it. They dont manage to improve their efciency of customer service this way, but their competitors may not yet be forcing them to do so. File servers and email are now commonplace at SMEs. They give users access to project documents, albeit without all the versioning and collaboration benets of document management systems. However, this is what everyone has been used to, and barring the one or two new employees who have been used to better elsewhere, its clearly still a workable system for many businesses. So, doing nothing may well be adequate for your business for now, but you must expect commercial pressures for change to grow over time. There is inevitability about the adoption of document management.

Build vs. Buy?

Document management systems can be costly to implement, so a smaller or mid-sized company should normally be looking to buy software packages for its document management solution whenever possible, limiting the commissioned new work to that of integration with other IT systems already in use. As with other business systems, such as ERP and CRM, you can probably still expect to pay as much to implement and integrate a document management system as for the software itself.

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Microsofts Document Management Solution

There are many vendors of document management solutions, but Microsofts dominance of the IT marketplace for SMEs demands a short mention here of Microsoft SharePoint a product that can be used with other document management systems or as a document management system in its own right. This paper does not endorse SharePoint, but Microsofts market position and policy of offering a version of SharePoint, to its existing customers without additional charge means this product is likely to become commonplace amongst smaller and mid-sized businesses. SharePoint is envisaged as rather more than a document management system with search, collaboration, and contact management features included.

We had always thought of document management as a separate system from our web site until we looked into portals. Now we want to offer customers and suppliers on-line access to all appropriate documents.

For documents particularly Microsoft Ofce documents it provides a centralized shared store of document libraries, with browser based access and management. Its web pages consist of collections of web parts, each of which gives a view of the data stored, such as lists of documents, blogs, shared calendars, and discussion boards. Alerts may be set to tell users when content changes or when they are required to do something in a workow. The product includes enterprise search technology so that users can search for words in any page or document with rapid results, rather like search engines on the internet such as Google or Yahoo!, but within the business instead. SharePoint typically needs a good deal of conguration after being installed, and depending on the nature of your business or specic requirements such as records management, it may not have the features that you require. You should also therefore explore document management products from other vendors as well.

The Tale of Glux and Screwluse

Lets consider two builders merchants, both using a mid-market ERP package to handle stock, shipments, and orders. These are paper intensive businesses and Glux wants to cut down on the amount of paper it has ying around so that it can improve customer service and get its employees more productive. Meanwhile, Screwluse is happy with the status quo.

Both companies have a trade counter and a busy telesales team. These sales teams take some orders by phone, but others arrive as written purchase orders by fax, email and post. Each method ends up producing orders in triplicate for the nance teams to process: printed paper copies, photocopies or hand written orders on carbonless paper pads from the sales staff (attaching a customers purchase order, if applicable). At each company the rst copy of each order goes to the customer at the trade counter or its retained in the telesales department for their records. The second copy gets entered onto the ERP system and then gets led in one of an endless set of lever arch les. The ERP system manages the shipments, with the companys drivers getting delivery notes produced by it signed for matching back up to the sales order paperwork by the nance team. Consignment numbers for deliveries by couriers are noted by hand against the orders in case of dispute at a later date. Invoices are issued by post with copies of the orders (the third part from the carbonless copies).

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Glux is planning a two stage project to improve things. First, it will capture orders directly into the ERP system by giving the trade counter and the sales team the ability to enter them directly using a browser and to capture supporting paperwork by scanning it into a document management system and having it linked across to the ERP system. The reseller of the ERP system is keen to do this for Glux, and part of this upgrade, documents produced from the ERP system will now be sent electronically by email and fax, with copies being stored in a document management system for reference. The lever arch les will go, just as soon as Gluxs nance department has faith in the new system. Later, Glux plans to add bar codes to the delivery notes so that signed copies can be scanned back into the document management system and automatically linked back into the ERP system to conrm delivery. The ERP reseller will come back in to do this work. Meanwhile, Screwluse plans to do nothing and pats itself on its back for keeping costs of its IT down so low. So, what happened one year later? Well, word got out that Glux sorted out any ordering and delivering problems faster than Screwluse. At Glux, customer care staff had everything on screen in moments to understand what had gone wrong with an order and therefore how to x it fast. Not that so many orders were now wrong; the error rate dropped when the nance team stopped having to squint at their colleagues scribbles as they entered orders for them. Happy customers spread the news and sales grew. Glux are even talking about setting up a portal where customers can check their accounts for themselves and view copies of paperwork online such as signed delivery notes. Cash ow has improved for Glux with electronic delivery of invoices and with less paperwork, they have not had to replace the leaver from their nance team and news from Screwluse? Well, theyre blaming the recession and the credit crunch for their downturn in sales and protability.

10 Stages to a Successful Project

Here are 10 stages you should plan to undertake in any document management implementation: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Read about the subject Review where you are Dene where you want to get Involve the appropriate people Create an outline design Select suppliers and products Agree a written plan Run a pilot Implement to plan Review

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Conclusions

This paper has sought to explain the business problems in an SME that a document management system can help solve. It has listed a number of features you can expect to see in a document management system and the benets derived from each. It has discussed how you might start a document management project at your organization, described the likely scenario following a do-nothing approach; and it has nished by introducing Microsofts document technology.. If you are a director or technical manager at a small or mid-sized company considering how to reduce the use of inefcient paper-based systems in your business improve customer service by giving your staff instant access to the right information when they need it, and prevent anyone wasting time working with out of date versions of document les

About Zetadocs
Zetadocs for Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Microsoft Dynamics GP will help accounts departments streamline business processes, reduce the costs of handling paper documents and enhance customer service. It will enable Microsoft Dynamics NAV users to create, deliver and share statements, invoices, remittances and other nancial documents instantly from their PC. Zetadocs for Microsoft Dynamics can then archive documents so they can be retrieved promptly, helping businesses respond to queries instantly. The business documents Zetadocs produces have a consistent look and feel, and can be shared with other users, enhancing customer service.

Audience

then this paper is for you.

Acknowledgments

This paper was prepared by Chris Oswald, CEO of Equisys Equisys Inc is a software house that provides software packages for document management and delivery. These include the award winning Zetafax network fax server and the acclaimed Zetadocs family for Microsoft Dynamics products. Equisys software products are designed for small and mid market businesses, and for departmental use at multinational companies. They stand out from the competition by being simple to install and manage, reliable and great value backed by outstanding service and support. Equisys has over 60,000 customers, in more than 100 countries, who are served through an international partner network of distributors, VARs, resellers and ISVs. The companys market leading fax server, Zetafax, speeds the ow of critical business documents by enabling users to send and receive faxes on their PCs. It integrates with ERP, CRM, accounting and other applications for automated faxing from those systems, providing auditable records of fax communications. Zetadocs helps users work smarter by creating and emailing PDF documents, streamlining business processes to remove tedious manual procedures and help companies improve the service levels they offer. Equisys was founded in 1987 and has ofces in London, UK and Atlanta GA, USA.

Equisys Inc 30000 Mill Creek Avenue, Suite 335, Alpharetta GA 30022, USA T +1 (770) 772 7201 F +1 (770) 442 5789 E sales@usa.equisys.com Equisys plc Equisys House, 32 Southwark Bridge Road, London SE1 9EU, UK T +44 (0) 20 7203 4000 F +44 (0) 20 7203 4005 E sales@equisys.com

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Zetadocs White Paper: Why use Document Management in your Business?