Ways to Help Your Company Adopt Electronic Document Management

There are many ways your company can benefit from using electronic document management. Using the cloud can help your employees save time, space, and money. But DMS is much more than cloud storage.

That’s something that any business can appreciate, regardless of the sector you are in.

Here are 5 ways you can show the benefits that come with using electronic document management:

Demonstrate the Financial Benefits

There are many ways that using electronic document management can help your company cut costs while increasing efficiency, which will increase your company’s bottom line.

Although many people get hung up on this point as it can sometimes seem as if there’s no way to reduce these costs, it’s strictly because the costs incurred without an electronic document management solution are costs even most financial departments don’t tabulate on the balance sheets–and it’s solely because the expenses can’t be traced until the solution helps the organization it serves to profit.

First, it cuts down on the costs of paper. Also, it increases efficiency by helping you stay more organized, giving you more time to work instead of simply sorting clutter.

Finally, it increases the amount of space you have available in your cubicle and office. Real estate space can be extremely expensive for companies, so utilizing space efficiently can pay huge dividends.

Focus on the Security Advantages

Many people worry that saving data online makes them especially vulnerable to data theft. However, if you take proper precautions like using a firewall and a secured network, your documents can be much safer than they would be as paper documents in a physical file cabinet.

But there isn’t even a need to have an IT person set all of this up.

You can opt-in to a cloud based electronic document management solution and gain many of the benefits companies only experience through IT personnel.

When you have electronic document management, you can sleep well at night knowing that your essential data is safe in the Cloud, instead of vulnerable to fires, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.

Show How it Can Make Your Workplace More Collaborative

Many companies talk about the importance of teamwork but don’t take full advantage of tools to help improve it. Electronic document management is one of the most effective ways to promote collaboration.

Using shared documents, team members can work on projects together anywhere in the world. Relying on simply email and editing would rob your employees of valuable time and limit their mobility.

Also, by incorporating document tracking, you can know who has contributed where, increasing personal accountability.

Sometimes collaboration isn’t understood in its proper light. It doesn’t just mean working together to complete a task.

Instead, it means the sharing of more effective processes to more easily produce desired outcomes, and this is something electronic document management solutions help employees within organizations achieve.

Illustrate the Compliance and Security Benefits

We have had numerous customers who were able to defend themselves in legal disputes because they were able to use electronic document management to provide evidence that cleared them of charges.

This is becoming especially important among consumers who are unsure whether they should trust companies with their personal information.

Whereas providing companies with personal information used to be a thoughtless process, Pew Research reports that consumers are becoming more hesitant about providing companies with this information.

As a business, you need to maintain lots of confidential material—insurance forms, work reviews, and other HR documents that need to be protected in order to protect your company from legal issues.

Physical paper based processes don’t let you use passwords for confidentiality purposes—electronic document management does.

There are also a number of ways to expedite workflow without sacrificing security.

For instance, the digital signature integration and authentication technologies behind e-signatures makes them a perfect sell for any paper-intensive workflow and contractual process.

These checklists tend to span a variety of different industries.

Another thing worth mentioning about the security and compliance benefits of an electronic document management solution is the numerous ways in which it can kill two birds with one stone.

For instance, a secure web portal not only lets you share a large number of files at once (and no matter what size they are), it also increases web visibility from a search engine optimization standpoint.

The custom URL it provides for companies who opt-in to it draws customers to the business’s domain, but also compounds the security benefits of visitation with the web traffic a company can get from it.

It’s basically the security equivalent of compound interest in the financial markets.

Explain How Easy It Is to Use

Some managers worry that implementing new technology can require lots of time and resources for training, and that is a valid concern. However, almost anyone can learn how to use electronic document management in a very short amount of time.

You’ll realize paper-based processes are much more difficult to use than technology that makes it easier.

The transition from paper to digital is not only easy—it’s enjoyable. It takes the stress away from having to sort through thousands of papers, and your employees will be able to take advantage of search functions to find past documents quickly.

Not only is an electronic document management solution the easiest way to receive these benefits, it also helps businesses solve their most common office problems.

Pander to the Fear of Becoming Outdated and Irrelevant

Yeah, this is a bit below the belt, but it’s something that everyone should be concerned about regardless of whether they believe in new age solutions.

Many companies are afraid they are going to become irrelevant without the right technology, and any organizational leader with foresight will understand this, provided you give them the evidence.

But this shouldn’t just be a concern for those leading organizational efforts; it should be a concern for the workers subject to the inefficient processes.

When bottom line suffers, sometimes it’s the processes employees abide by that are cause for concern–not the work or capabilities of the employees themselves.