Digital document management can transform your business. If you’re just getting started, or want to improve the effectiveness of your solution, here are some best practices to help.

1. Set Goals and Metrics

A document management system can do a number of things for your business, but where do you want the biggest impact to be? Setting specific goals can help you prioritize the functions that you need, and give you a way to measure your success over time. Goals may include things like finding documents more quickly, saving money on storage, or decreasing the time to process invoices.

2. Consider Which Automation Features are Most Important to You

Automation is a key feature of a document management system, but to get the most bang for your buck focus on automating the processes that will serve your business best. Look at where the biggest slowdowns are in your business now to see if automation can help speed up the process.

3. Improve on your current processes

You shouldn’t try to emulate paper-based processes with digital document management, but rather improve it. Automating workflows can eliminate steps that had been bottlenecks in the system before. Take this opportunity to redesign your processes for efficiency.

4. Capture content from the start

If you have to print and scan or manually enter data, you’re missing out on the full benefit of digital management. Wherever your data originates, try to capture it digitally there, such as by using electronic forms.

5. Index wisely

Indexing your data makes it easy to search later, but gathering too much data to index can slow the process down. Look at what information is key to your business needs and index based on those terms.

6. Keep it simple

Digital document management is meant to improve your business, but a complex user interface can hinder its effectiveness. Customize the interface based on the needs of individual employees, so tasks can be completed efficiently.

Digital document management can change the way you do business, but it’s important to follow best practices to get the most out of it. By carefully choosing your automation, indexes, and when data is captured, you can enjoy an efficient and successful data management strategy.

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