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Capture, Index, Access: The Paperless Office Provides Centralized Intelligence for Small Businesses

By Laurel Sanders, Optical Image Technology, Inc.

Every business, regardless of its size, needs to have a solid understanding of its customers and business-related documents in order to make good decisions. Unfortunately, business owners don't have a central intelligence agency to provide insightful advice or enable management to make proactive, informed decisions. However, small businesses can have access to their own version of a well-informed "CIA" that does the work of intelligent search and retrieval behind the scenes, provides them with real-time information, and helps them to succeed. Secure information Capture, Indexing, and Access give a company's pre-designated individuals and groups the right to access, view, annotate, and/or act upon all of an organization's missioncritical business information that is needed to perform tasks accurately and efficiently. It helps staff to maximize productivity, and ensures that each person‚s skills are used wisely rather than for the endless paper chase.

Ready access to information becomes the springboard to enhanced customer services, greater efficiency, and better decision making. This article explains these and other fundamental business benefits of electronic document management. It introduces four distinctly different methods (scanning, fax/email management, online forms, and adding bar codes to forms) to help businesses gain control over their paper and information. Finally, it provides several tips to maximize the value of the easy, yet secure access that a well-conceived, Web-based electronic document management (EDM) system provides.

Fundamental benefits of electronic document management

Capturing and centralizing business information

In order for any organization's staff to be effective, information needs to be accurate, detailed, complete, timely, and easy for the right people to access. In a paper-based system, this can be difficult. Even in a small office, each person has specific duties, and may handle separate document types. Some may require information from specific forms that differs from the needs of other colleagues. Useful information may be trapped in a staff member‚s software application, unknown to others who need it. Some information may be trapped in documents that are stored off site; files may be housed briefly in someone's office or in transit; or pages from a document may be inadvertently placed into the wrong file, or even lost. Files temporarily pulled from storage by one member of staff may result in data needlessly being recreated or recollected by someone else who needs it, wasting time and creating the possibility of errors or redundancy. The level of thoroughness on standard forms that are completed by staff or customers may vary greatly, resulting in insufficient or incomplete information. This can result in unnecessary follow-up calls, mail, or email as missing information is chased and then added to the appropriate file.

A document management system puts flexibility and control into the hands of the company that deploys it. Regardless of whether data comes from postal mail, email, photos, voice messages, or other formats, an EDM system enables a business to centralize all of its information in one place. It allows a company‚s designees to specify which information is imperative, which data needs to be searchable, the format in which it needs to be entered to achieve the desired data consistency, how it needs to be categorized, and much more. Rather than having to search paper files for historical documents, perform queries in an accounting or other software system, dig through boxes of photos, or listen to archived voice mails, everything is available digitally to those who are granted access.

An EDM system also increases efficiency by allowing data that is common to multiple forms, and which would normally be rekeyed upon the receipt of each form (such as document numbers or customer names), to pre-fill fields automatically based on specified information such as customer IDs. This eliminates time consuming and unnecessary manual data entry, reducing both redundancy and errors. Staff productivity and services improve, and the headaches of regulatory compliance and audits are removed. Management gets the real-time information it needs to make better decisions.

To read more, download the PDF below:

 
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