Electronic Document Management (EDM) provides users with a central location to capture, manage, share, and protect all of the files for their office.
There are many reasons to invest in an electronic document management system, the most obvious being the ability to access files anytime and anywhere.
But what other benefits are there to EDMS? The benefits are most easily observed in confluence with the most overlooked components of these solutions, ironically.
Electronic Document Management Reduces Manual Data Entry and Error
One of the biggest benefits of an EDM is that it enables companies to electronically capture and store documents, including things like verification of purchases, invoice data, and more with form fill automation, too. This is one of the numerous benefits of Zone OCR technology, which rids departments of repetitive, manual document processes.
Documents can be scanned, captured via email or webpage, and more. This means that there is less need for manual data entry. This results in two things: reduced operating costs and reduced error. What business doesn’t want that?
EDMS Improves Efficiency and Productivity Across All Document-intensive Industries
EDMs are going to improve efficiency in many areas. For example, finding necessary documents becomes much easier. Why? Because EDMS are metric-centered, which allows users to find everything related to a specific client, topic, subject, etc. with a few simple keystrokes.
The sophisticated Boolean searches and complex algorithms make document retrieval easy, even when you don’t know the name of the documents you are searching for.
It is easy to find your own documents, as you usually know what they are titled and where they are stored. But what happens if you need the file that Bob was working on, and he is out of the office sick or on a family vacation?
EDMS eliminates those kinds of problems.
In addition, efficiency improves because everyone will use the same conventions because they are all using the same system. This makes accessing and finding documents created by others far easier, and everything is organized the same way and stored in the same place, instead of some documents being on the server and some on local desktops.
This cuts down on human error and makes working between departments or with clients streamlined and easy.
Electronic Document Management Improves Business Security
In many industries, having the ability to control document access is important. Unlike using passwords, which can be forgotten or easily discovered (typically because people can’t remember them, so they write them down), documents can be protected by only making them available to the people who need to see them, whether it is a specific person or a specific department.
In addition to the security of limited or specified access for certain documents, security provisions—such as an audit trail showing who last accessed the documents, who printed it, who made changes to it, and who viewed it—can make it easy to keep the highly confidential client matters, just that confidential.