Document storage best practices are imperative in an era dominated by the creation and loss of data. Struggling with boatloads of paper-based information in your office?
If so, the extent of the problem is likely greater than you even know, and a lack of document management storage best practices is to blame: the amount of time paper wastes in offices of all industries is jaw-dropping: Anywhere from 20-30 percent of employees’ time is spent searching for information in filing cabinets or needlessly re-creating information that is not really “lost,” just jammed up somewhere non-retrievable.
However, the features below, although commonly forgotten in document management solutions, can ensure document storage best practices for records management purposes and greater organizational efficiency.
7. Structured Query Language (SQL)
Many enterprise software vendors will meet SQL requirements and standards as they are put forth by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
A structured query language is primarily used in software to communicate with a database, simplifying the process by which document storage best practices can occur. A document management solution with a robust SQL feature will help organizations of all sizes (not just small to mid-sized organizations) better manage extensive files, folders, content, or users.
Additionally, SQL offers superior performance improvements in searching and templating applications, workflow processing features of a document management solution, and drawer imports from CSV formats, also lending to document storage best practices.
Many leading document management vendors have readjusted the SQL functions of their products in the past two years to improve communication with computer databases, and depending on how much an organization wants to manage its systems, irrespective of its size, selecting the option with the most recent SQL upgrade may be beneficial.
The optimal grade SQL option for organizations can improve the speed of software functions by up to 1,000 times—showing the importance of ample, enterprise-grade SQLs from the business process management perspective.
6. Creating Document Storage Best Practices: Digital File, Folder, and Drawer Cut and Paste
In implementing the user experience from simple office materials to a fully digitized format, document management vendors should have solution that can cut and paste files, folders, and drawers from one location within the templating formation to another—making organization easier than it would be via physical filing storage—a surefire way to forego document storage best practices.
This should be as simple as doing so through a drag and drop feature inherent to the document management vendors’ platform. Given the import of this feature, there should be a barrier to automated storage reallocation, such as a “confirm movement’ button.
5. Full Text Search
A full text search gives users the ability to look for terms within the body of readable documents like Microsoft Word, as well as PDF or picture files that have been processed through the adjustable OCR engine, and at a much rapider pace.
Document storage best practices are easily facilitated when ease of folder structure automation is made possible through full text search and other features.
4. Templates and Predefined Content
This feature saves time by easily creating consistency in file names. When adding a new file to a folder, it quickly assigns a name to the file that the user has already predetermined—making it retrievable to those with the appropriate user permissions.
Essentially, this feature is to document titles what predictive coding is to folder structures—a simpler way to store documents to ensure best digital practices.
3. Desktop Alerts for Document Storage Best Practices
A basic yet crucial speed facilitator, desktop alerts notify users of predefined document statuses or ECM workflow cycles—paving inroads to faster task completion and less lag time between individual group members’ completions of specific tasks.
2. Audit Trails
There are two kinds of audits simplified by a document management solution: internal audits and external audits (the only two kinds of audits, even outside the scope of this discussion). The internal audit trail feature of most document management technologies gives administrators and managers employed by the organization the ability to track the accountability, progress, and task completion of employees to ensure best practices in document storage.
An external audit, which entails a third party neither employed nor paid by the business under investigation, makes information accessible, traceable, and compliant by industry within the ECM. Perhaps the most crucial benefit of the external audit trail function is the reduction of the time required to complete the auditing process.
This is especially true given the ever-increasing rate of organizations’ information retention and regulating bodies’ expectation of auditors to conduct more information audits—accommodating the rate of growth this information has seen.
1. The Right Paperless Office Scanner
The first step to ensuring document storage best practices, scanning is imperative to the imaging process in organizations of all sizes and in all industries.
In tandem with an 80-page throughput capacity, speed is also important for scanning integrations. A 60 page per minute or one page per second rate is a satisfactory standard for a small to mid-sized organization with a reasonable amount of paper content to upload to the document management solution.
The scanner selected should make throughput a simple process, turning scanning into an easy, one-button process through a compact technology, offering multi-sheet scanning to users. The better the scanner’s capacity to upload documents accordingly, the more efficient the scanning portion of going paperless becomes.
Do you have the document management technology to facilitate these best practices? If not visit our product pages.
https://content.efilecabinet.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/DMS-Best-Practices-08.jpg