Implementing Document Management System

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Executive Summary

Everyone organizes their documents, emails, scans, electronic faxes, graphics, etc. in some fashion, whether or not they use a document management system ("DMS"). More sophisticated users develop naming conventions to make identifying and retrieving documents easier. Document management in the age of vast and relative cheap computer storage space has made organizing files more difficult than ever before. Selecting a document management system is a daunting task and should be carefully considered. The amount of time spent managing documents outside of a document management system should be investigated to determine if there is a compelling reason to use a system. Just as everyone organizes their documents, so too has everyone not using a document management system spent much too much time hunting for "lost" documents, often even re-typing them, hunting for subdirectories that were "dragged and dropped" who knows where, and so on. These are some of the issues that typically drive firms to adopt a document management system.

Today, enterprises are swamped with information that goes beyond traditional "documents," including emails, faxes, scanned documents and pages saved from the Internet, as well as traditional documents generated by the firm. A Document Management System brings order to this chaos: organizing it by client/matter, categorizing the types of documents you have and directing them to the proper place. So by "documents" here we include all these items.

This paper highlights the business benefits of implementing a document management system along with the best practices that need to be considered while implementing the system.

1.

A first look at documents in organizations

For medium and large firms, with tens or hundreds of thousands of documents, using a document management program to organize, index and control their documents is an absolute necessity. Many professionals and smaller firms, however, do not see the need as well. They feel that with a well thought out directory structure they can have adequate access to their documents there by enhacing productivity. This paper details some of the advantages document management offers even a one man business.

Naturally, there is a wide range of opinion concerning what features are critical and which are "superfluous" bells and whistles. And like word processing programs, document management tends to conform to the "80-20" rule: 80% of people use only 20% of the program. However, people in different practice areas or with administrative functions tend to use a different 20% of the program. And keep in mind that when a feature that might otherwise be considered an "extra" is needed, it is often very badly needed.

Key Considerations/Features in Opting for Document Management:

http://www.grook.net/sites/default/files/images/kettaneh/Electronic%20Document%20Management.jpg

What are the key considerations that lead a firm to adopt a document management system rather than continuing with a manual system?

Client/Matter-Centric Approach:- Many individual professionals use their Outlook in-box as their "document management system," often storing 5-10,000 emails there. The problem is that Outlook is based on individuals: there is no automated way to locate all the emails relevant to a particular matter across the firm. Document management systems, on the other hand, tend to be client- or matter-centric: everything is organized around clients and matters.

Centralizing Force: Document management is a centralizing force. When all users are obliged to use the same system, you are assured that, for example, all correspondence is stored under "correspondence" rather than "letters;" or under "motions" rather than differing subsets of motions and that everyone uses the same conventions. In addition, it ensures that all documents, emails, faxes, scans and saved Web pages are stored in the same place, rather than some being stored on the server and some on the local desktop; that all documents are organized using the same system instead of having a given client’s documents stored using different criteria – by user, by practice area, document type, etc. This is also an increasingly important criterion in relation to electronic ediscovery as it facilitates rapid and complete retrieval of all relevant documents.

Greater Speed of Document Retrieval: In a manual system, the user must know where an existing document has been stored and what its name is. While most users are fairly efficient at finding their own documents, searching for a document created by someone else can take a significant amount of

time, which in any event is bound to be greater than the 5 seconds or less it takes a document management system to find a document. In many cases, a user spends 5 minutes or more searching for a document, or even winds up retyping it!

Avoidance of Human Error: The time lost in a manual system due to human error is substantial. A user may have stored a document in the wrong place by accident, forgotten what the document was named, or even "dragged and dropped" an entire directory to some new location without even being aware of it. When someone other than the original author tries to access a document, difficulties are compounded. A user may have to look in four or five places before finding a document, or even be unable to find it at all. If the original author of the document is out of the office due to vacation, illness, etc. this can be a serious problem. When people change jobs or assignments, the problem is further aggravated.

Control over Document Access: Document management typically gives a firm much better control over document security and access. Confidential documents can be made available only to the people who need to see them, whether it is accounting, human resources, trusts and estates or those responsible for highly confidential client matters. By defining what groups of people have access to which kinds of documents, document management systems avoid the problems inherent in pass wording documents, which range from forgetting passwords to posting them on yellow stickers on the computer monitor. Security provisions frequently include an audit trail showing who last accessed a document, who made changes, printed it, checked it out, etc.

Full Profile and Text Indexing: The fact that profiles and the full text of all documents are indexed has other advantages besides increased efficiency in retrieving documents. For example, you can define a search that lets you see at a glance all documents of a particular type that contain certain words (all briefs containing the term "amputation" for example). Full text indexing can also be of assistance in conflict checking, for example by searching on all documents that refer to a particular business or person. While desktop search engines will full text index your documents, they are not matter-centric, so a combined search for text + type of document or client is not available.

Email Integration: With more and more communication and document exchange taking place via email, integration of your email system into the document management system is increasingly important. With the new rules on ediscovery, one could even argue that this might be the most critical item in a document management system.

Some questions to ask yourself to help you calculate the ROI

>> How many people does my office employ to manage documents and what do they get paid per hour?

>> How many documents need to be retrieved and how many copies of documents are created every day?

>> What are the costs of office supplies (stationery etc.) every month?

>> What is the monthly cost incurred on storing documents?

There are, of course, many other points you may need to consider to get the numbers right depending on the size and complexity of your business. Let us take a very basic example, where your company hires 10 people whose primary job is handling documents and who get paid at $12 an hour. If each employee spends 1 hour on average searching a paper based document, retrieving it, making copies of it and filing it again; you end up incurring $120 every day simply on managing documents! In a month of 22 business days, that's $2,640 - or $31,680 a year; not a petty amount by any means - even for a large organization. Now say you invested in multi user document management software costing $1,000 for a 10 user discounted license pack. You also purchase a scanner for $500. Assuming that support and upgrades are free for the first year, your total investment will be $1,500.

Your employees will have all their documents stored in the document management system's database and accessible from the DMS, so it will only take them a few seconds to pull up the files they need and possibly a few minutes to scan any documents, which equates to a much more productive working day. Numerically speaking, with your 10 employees spending hardly 15 minutes each day managing documents, the per employee cost at $12 an hour will be just $3; and your total daily cost will only be $30! That means you would spend $660 a month - just $7,920 a year managing documents. Add to it the $1,500 you invested in the DMS with a scanner, and your total cost is only $9,420. How much do you save? That's right: $31,680 less $9,420 = $22,260 in the first year itself!

DOXPLORE: Improve your business productivity and efficiency

Doxplore can positively impact every critical aspect of your organization and your most important business processes. Recent studies have shown that companies spend approximately 6% of their annual revenue on "document-related costs." This is as much as three times the average amount they invest in R&D. Each year the amount of information created across enterprises in paper and digital formats combined grows faster than 65 percent.

This influx of information is not only increasing, but up to 80 percent of it comes in an unstructured format. Workers across all organizations are spending more and more time sifting through this information from multiple channels and inconsistent formats, leading to decreased productivity and an increase in inefficient, manual processes. Some reports suggest up to 28 percent of the typical workday is wasted by interruptions caused by unnecessary information, with 42 percent of people accidentally using the wrong information at least once per week.

Business Benefits of DOXPLORE

Structured Digital Document Storage - Manage all your electronic documents in a structure form for easy management.

Custom Classification -Create and apply classification to documents that are tuned to classification terms you use in your day to day job functions.

Document Retrieval - Search and locate documents instantly by content, file-name and 'Properties' (classification) search.

Make images searchable - Import all your scanned images, classify them with multiple ‘properties’ and convert them into searchable digital assets.

Efficiently organize and archive your MS outlook emails - Locate emails no matter how old within seconds and convert your emails into a digital warehouse of interactions and information.

Smart sync - Make changes to your documents even with Doxplore being inactive and be assured that all changes will be auto-synced when you login the next time.

Accelerate Productivity

>> Organize your documents, MS Outlook emails and images in a single location and ensure accelerated productivity with a streamlined experience.

>> Seamlessly work with multiple document formats.

>> One click preview of searched documents.

>> Manage job workflows using classification of documents, images and MS Outlook emails.

>> Professional Doxplore is simple to use although highly effective and so you can be up and running with minimal training.

Summary

Every organization is different in its operations, and faces different problems due to particular work processes and goals. Nevertheless, there are several general findings relevant to almost all organizations, and they can be earmarked for analysis and further action in the drive to improve document workflow systems. At the highest level of review, there is an overarching problem affecting nearly all organizations in their document use. Most organizations, including their management, do not have any great awareness of the true impact of document workflows on their business, in efficiency and productivity terms, and also in real costs.

There is a genuine need – and an opportunity – for broader education about the worth of documents in an organization, and the real value that comes from ensuring documents work for the benefit of the business through effective and timely processes. They come from streamlined document creation right through to archival – an automated, efficient document workflow system. This also requires understanding from everyone involved in the document workflow that process change is needed, along with a positive attitude to altering work behavior.