Have you ever wondered about the decision factors, benefits, and challenges during a Document Management System (DMS) implementation?

Intro/Preface

This article may take you a step forward in concluding the implementation of your future DMS of choice. The previous article was about features of ideal DMS. Here you may gain some insights into key factors to consider when deciding about committing to DMS. Let’s start planning that journey with a reminder, just as similar to what we did in the previous one. Owners-to-be of DMS are thinking “how to”:

• Handle massive amounts of business documents,
• Enforce regulatory compliance,
• Automate document management,
• Deliver in time (customer content, project content),
• Make remote workforce employers efficient,
• Stop using cloud file storage (because of many limitations).

The high volume of business transactions results in massive amounts of documents classified and shared efficiently. One of the best ways to make it happen is to utilize DMS to organize, store and retrieve documents. Most organizations have to comply with rules, either external, internal, or frequently both. Keeping organization-wide compliance updated is easy with DMS taking care that the most recent document version is circulating. Proper document automation provides consistency and can increase productivity, speeding up routine tasks and avoiding manual processing errors. If you want to increase your competitiveness, well-timed communication with your customers is essential. Propagation of documents from you to your client may streamline by “opening” your DMS for them. The importance of a system capable of supporting remote work is even more important nowadays. A versatile DMS handles all remote workforce access requirements securely. Having spacious file storage seems to be a solution for poor man’s DMS. Wait, do you need versioning? If you are not prepared to live with limitations, purchasing the proper DMS will provide all that you truly need, and you won’t regret your investment, ever.

Decision factors

Let’s focus on the primary group of decision factors for comparison between DMS solutions. You may extend the list of factors to get more accurate parameters, and you may start with the following:

• Efficiency (time and costs),
• Centralized document repository,
• Accessibility for documents,
• Securing content,
• Integrations with third-party software,
• Organizing documents for future use,
• Sharing and monitoring use of documents.

An obvious DMS implementation goal is to increase the productivity of an organization, so you may start with how a future DMS would impact the reduction of document processing time. This outcome is closely related to functionalities for collaboration, search, workflow, and automation. When you want to provide a single centralized document repository, a candidate DMS must provide a domain for your entire digital content, plus digitizing physical documents (scanning and OCR support). Accessibility for documents will enable your whole organization to use documents according to authorizations and is closely related to security. Some other security aspects are enforced utilizing reliable information storage and use digital signatures. In that way, information is available per-need basis, and its’ integrity is maintained. Integration with other software provides paths to enter documents to DMS from various sources. Some of these sources may be an add-on for mail clients (Microsoft Outlook), support for calendars, and integration with document editors (such as Microsoft Word). To provide long-term usability of documents, functionalities like audit trail and version control come in handy to roll back if required. Access controls and check-in/check-out functionalities are support for the monitoring of documents usage and simultaneous work.

Benefits you may expect

When investing in a DMS, you rightfully expect certain benefits. Here is the benefits list you may foresee:

• Centralizing and streamlining management of documents,
• Collaboration improvements and fast documents updates,
• Increased protection of documents at all times/data security & access,
• Improved document retrieval,
• Reinforced regulatory compliance,
• Minimizing carbon footprint.

Streamlining the management of documents should extend to all documents, including document templates. It will remove redundancy and avoid wasteful communication. Functionalities such as management of incoming and outgoing mail provide centralization of communication records. To further improve communication, look for features like sending emails from the DMS. Documents access for the remote workforce results in collaboration improvements. We can not stress enough the importance of making your document vault secure. Look for security functionalities at all levels, from access rights to create, read, update and delete documents, all the way to the maintenance of supporting structures such as classification trees. Document retrieval should rely on a versatile search subsystem, preferably capable of providing both simple and advanced searches at will. Most companies and industries are regulated, so your DMS should support this. One way to achieve it is by providing a clear framework for maintaining forms, instructions, and procedures. A paperless office will reduce office supplies expenses. It helps eliminate paper waste, minimize the use of toner (ink), and archive space savings (file cabinets, HVAC, dedicated rooms). Such interventions should have a substantial impact on minimizing your company’s carbon footprint.

Challenges during implementation

Time to face the reality. There will be some, perhaps many, challenges, and you need to stay prepared. Some of the most difficult are:

• Users learning curve (using system),
• Changing the way of work and processes,
• Potentially high costs.

Make an estimate of time for learning, and users must make a conscious effort to learn how to use the new DMS. It takes time. The learning pace may vary between different departments or age groups. Do your best to acquire the DMS that allows users to capitalize on past knowledge or rely on experience with a similar user interface. Change management is paramount. Users need to adopt the new framework that will allow for organizational growth. It is far from easy. Users will have to make a transition to an improved way of working. Process remodeling and improvements will happen. Then employees will have to adopt new processes, preferably with the assistance of workflow capable DMS. High-grade DMS may come at a costly price tag. The DMS is the solution to many organizational problems and offers productivity gains. There are many ways to estimate how the DMS investment impacts organizational performance, which is a subject for another article.

Outro/Conclusion

There are several things to consider before deciding to invest in the implementation of a DMS. Whether you think about the volume of documents, regulatory compliance, automation, customer satisfaction, your remote workforce, your future DMS needs to provide functionalities to support your needs. Your decision factors need to include a measure of efficiency, centralization, accessible and secure documents, integration with existing systems, and planning for the future. Improving a relation between your expectations and features offered by a DMS, may assist in providing facts for the best decision. And you certainly want to make the best investment by making informed choices.

About the Author

Damir Divkovic has been implementing document solutions for over a decade. He is enthusiastically contributing as a consultant and designing training courses. His involvement/background in engineering provided him the opportunity to develop creativity, analytical and problem-solving skills. Likes to innovate.