Customers have an affinity for companies which do their best to be as green as possible. It’s easy to enforce policies which save a little time and effort within the company, but which result in huge wastages of paper, plastic, and other finite resources. A document management system could be the end of these paper wastage woes, leading to a completely revolutionised information handling system within your company, and between partner companies. The article below will describe the ways in which document management can help your company’s green agenda, and will provide some simple pointers regarding the implementation of this system.
What is a document management system?
A document management system is a highly sought after business tool to streamline the processing and storage of documents within a company or organisation. It often includes a way to digitise the post you receive each morning, such as automated scanners and image conversion software, as well as programs custom designed to sort and categories each of the documents scanned. Some more high-tech systems even include text recognition software which allows the system to pick out certain key phrases, names, or even email addresses and telephone numbers, then either flagg them for later or file them in the appropriate area of the system.
How can a document management system benefit my business?
Before the advent of the document management systems in use today, business often required a team of porters to ferry printed documents between different depots where they could be sorted and responded to. The modern office has no porters, and no expensive printed materials. Employees in the office of today communicate only by email to other employees within the company and outside, sharing information using the bits and bytes of the internet, rather than the inks and blots of the printed word. Allowing your employees to communicate using digitally encoded information shooting down the copper cable or fibre optic internet connections your company makes use of will dramatically boost productivity, and will slash the time spent communicating between different departments and buildings in person. This reduction in paperwork will not only win you coveted ‘green points’ among your customer base, it will also gain you some respect among colleagues and fellow business owners, thereby increasing profitability and boosting the likelihood of lucrative business deals taking place with the new found respect among your business circle coming into play.
Are there any disadvantages to a document management system?
While document management systems can and do revolutionise business all over the world and every day, they can be prohibitively expensive to set up. It’s worth checking with government departments to investigate the availability of grants or subsidies for the machinery required to go paperless. It’s also important to adequately investigate the full costs of an entirely paperless company, and balance this against the savings made by withdrawing printed media from your company. While the initial expense of this system may be high, it’s worth taking small steps to make the most of a setup which is bound to save you and your company money in the long run.
Of all the ways that your company can be made greener, investing in a document management system is one of the best ways to bring this idea into reality. By investing in the machinery and data infrastructure required, you too can have a paperless office with the appropriate document management software and hardware.