Both small businesses and large corporations use document management to manage the flood of information efficiently, transparently and securely.
Document management: This is what it means
Companies in all kinds of industries – large and small – have to manage documents and information, including hospitals and law firms. Every day, countless data is produced, processed and stored there. In order to efficiently manage this flood of information, most use what is known as document management.
- Document management, often Document management system, DMS for short, describes the structured handling of electronic documents and physical document folders within an organization.
- Such a system makes it possible to capture, store, manage, search and archive documents. It offers a digital solution to Optimize document flow and simplify work processes.
- You capture the documents by scanning, by email or by creating them directly in the system or by integrating existing data sources. After you have captured these, you must store the documents in a structured manner and sort them, for example, by categories, keywords or metadata.
- Using keywords, dates or other metadata, you can quickly find the documents you are looking for. Modern DMS often even use so-called optical character recognition, or OCR for short, to make the content of scanned documents searchable.
- You can also share documents for editing, which means that several people can work on a document at the same time. Approval processes (workflows) are also often shown.
- After certain periods of time, you can have documents archived or deleted in order to conserve storage resources and comply with legal requirements – such as the GoBD, short for the “principles for the proper management and storage of books, records and documents in electronic form”.
- The main goal of document management is to To facilitate access to information, store documents securely and organize them clearly.
These are the advantages of a document management system
The use of a DMS brings numerous advantages, allowing you to make workflows more efficient and of higher quality:
- Time saving: The structured filing and quick search functions save you a lot of time when searching for documents.
- Cost savings: Less paper consumption, less storage space for physical documents and more efficient processes save costs in the long term.
- Increased transparency: All editing steps and changes to a document can be traced, which in turn leads to better transparency and controllability.
- Better collaboration: Teams can access and collaborate on documents from anywhere, making collaboration easier.
- Legal certainty: By having your DMS automatically comply with legal time and storage requirements, the risk of incurring penalties due to violations of retention periods is minimized.