Organisations regularly come up with ways of enhancing business processes and security postures. They make investments that reduce the amount of effort needed to achieve a business outcome. Whether your company produces products or delivers services, efficient processes help in delivering to customer satisfaction.
Every stakeholder needs to be aware of the business goals that the process is designed to achieve, the constraints the process must operate within and strengths and weaknesses of the process in its current state while establishing efficient business processes. Understanding of these elements and a consensus to implement strengthening strategies often position the organisation for better operational efficiency, resources utilisation, customer satisfaction, improved profit margins, reduced excess inventory and enhanced information security.
One of the building blocks for efficient business processes is effective management of information – a core determinant to successful operations and survival in harsh times. Information could be paper-based or electronic. Organisations that implement an end-to-end document management system (DMS) have a firmer grip over their business processes. Ignoring this building blocks expose the business to significant risks including:
1. Low Information Security Posture
In environments where business communication is largely paper based, you can’t predict when and where the user will store critical documents. In adequate controls like this may cause theft difficult to realize. DMS will help organisations to achieve controlled process for handling critical documents – paperless system – which is more secure, flexible, customizable, and even searchable. With this system, misfiled documents won’t be as much of a pain anymore. In this era of remote working, your stakeholders can access documents anywhere enabling efficiency.
2. Inadequate Disaster Recovery Scheme
Can you imagine customer service failure after a fire incident? This is because the data or information required to service the client has gone with the fire. Businesses should put measures in place to be ready to deliver the best and be prepared for the worst, like a natural or man-made disaster. DMS will help you manage your paper-based documents and your digital files.
- Delivery Delays and Cost Overruns
The storage of physical documents whether on site or off site creates bottleneck in accessing information for service delivery or decision making. If this system is the source of your core and critical information, your stakeholder will have difficulty getting much needed access timely and triggers cost escalations. The deployment of an electronic document management system (EDMS) for managing documents makes search and retrieve pleasurable. Above all, you don’t need to spend money in office spaces and dedicated staff to cater for the critical document archive.
- Eluding Market Share
In this digital age, organisations aspire to meet with the evolving market and customer expectations, thus completely altering the way they are managed and operated, and how value is delivered to customers. Businesses that have an EDMS for managing information are far better placed to succeed. EDM instils better communication, lowers costs, enables quick turnaround times, and improves productivity and quality levels. With all these, such organisations are poised to be highly competitive and give their rivals a run for their money.
- Disconnected Communication, Poor Decision Making
Most business processes involve stages of conception, iteration, research, decision, and execution, and then a follow-up review. Multiple departments are involved in the entire exercise. When the source documents are not at the fingertips of every stakeholder in the business process, it can hamper the smooth communication of ideas and relevant data. If a business decision is made in a hurry and with incomplete data or without the required inputs from the entire team, it could lead to a loss in terms of revenue, market share, or other such performance indicators.
- Missing the opportunity to delight customers
When your front desk officers have a single source of truth for servicing customers, they will be more confident handling customer issues. But if the source documents must be retrieved from a third-party archive or cabinet at one corner of the office building, there could be delays in responding to customers – many of whom are inpatient. Leveraging on the capability of DMS can give you a lot of advantages. Having all the information the customer needs means a ‘first contact resolution’ and no repeat calls for the same issue – something every business wants to achieve 100 percent of the time.
- Reputational Loss
Have you really pondered on the impact of losing a critical document to a security breach? It can lead to regulatory fines, identity theft and fraud, unhappy customers or employees, negative media attention and expensive lawsuits. When sensitive documents are not controlled and they are compromised, reputation loss could result. This can adversely impact the organization’s position in the market and have a cascading effect on other areas of operation.
- Failing to comply with legal requirements
Industries have varied regulations around document handling. Most require the maintenance of records in an organized way to be secure and accessible. Managing paper archives without scanning the documents is undoubtedly tougher than managing documents in electronic formats. Electronic documents are easily created, stored, modified, shared, and transmitted than paper documents. In the absence of an EDMS, an organization can have a hard time organizing its information repository so that it complies with applicable laws.
Conclusion
The costs of going paperless are small compared to the potential consequences of not switching to electronic document management. The above risks are just some of the situations that could happen to businesses that didn’t implement EDMS. Delay in the implementation can have a ripple effect in each mentioned area. As with everything else, the hardest step is the first step toward change. The organizations that have taken this step have seen their operations transformed and have enjoyed a return on investment in their document management solution.
Mitiget is your sure partner in the implementation of an end-to-end document management system. Contact us today for a free evaluation and further discussion on your document management project requirement. We do documents right!
