The way in which you handle day-to-day documents and files can have a huge impact on your business and the quality you give to your customers. Get it right and you’ll find yourself on the road to success with a bulging bottom line and customer satisfaction to boast about. Get it wrong and you could easily lose vital information, customers or worse face to face with a judge.
Unfortunately plenty of companies neglect document and quality management, blaming time constraints, lack of storage space, and a dozen other excuses.
Effective document and quality management needn’t be difficult, and can bring order to chaos: organising your documents by category or type with processes that is thorough, effective and best of all, easy to maintain once in place.
Some of the advantages of effective document management include:
- Improved access to documents
- Improved office efficiency
- Reduced day-to-day operation costs
- Better use of office space
- Safeguarding of confidential information
- Reduced customer complaints
- Prevention of legal breaches
Why Document Management
For medium and large organisations, with tens or hundreds of thousands of documents, using a document management solution to organise, index and control their documents is an absolute necessity.
Many smaller businesses however do not see the need. They feel that with a well thought out directory structure they can have adequate access to their documents and argue that any added functionality offered by document management system is not worth the expense of additional hardware, software, training, and administration.
Business consultants say “Lose your records and you lose your business”.
It sounds dramatic doesn’t it? However, statistics confirm it.
In the event of physical catastrophe in the office, using Document Management software means all your records can be retrieved via a routine “restore from backup” action. In other words an effective Disaster Recovery policy is in place.
The main benefits of electronic document management are:
- Electronic document management frees your staff from the drudgery of bulk paper filing and intuitive additional tools help streamline work processes even further.
- Powerful filing flexibility – the same document can be filed under several references such as Name, Document Number and Date – not possible with paper documents or computer files unless copies are made. This lays the foundation for a very effective retrieval tool.
- Indexing a document is an easier and simpler task than giving it a complex filename and having to save it to a particular named Explorer folder.
- Integrating the filing of other electronic files as well as paper documents enables you to achieve one consistent and logical filing structure for ALL your documents.
- Paper and PC-generated files received from any source (Post, Email or Fax) are filed into one system. They can then be viewed or actioned by any user or group of users simultaneously across your network or internet.
- The ability to share documents has several advantages:
- inter-departmental queries are resolved more effectively by reducing the time and physical effort required to communicate and move between departments
- When talking to customers, questions can be answered instantly, as information such as specifications, price lists & delivery notes can easily be searched for and retrieved.
- The need to print or copy documents reduces dramatically, saving time, money and more importantly the environment.
- No more lost or mislaid files.The ability to share documents has several advantages:
- A 4-drawer filing cabinet typically contains 8-10,000 pieces of paper, occupies 0.7 square metres (7.5 square feet) of precious office space, and takes around 100 valuable staff hours to fill. By the time it is full, many documents will not have been retrieved since they were first filed: as many as 1 in 10 will be missing or in the wrong place: and once full, it is a costly and inefficient chore to weed out old files – either for archiving, or for destruction. A misfiled piece of paper is as bad as a lost piece of paper: in both cases, the information is not available.
- Freeing up expensive floor space can result in large cost savings as space becomes available. More desks or new equipment can be added without having to consider larger premises.Paper and PC-generated files received from any source (Post, Email or Fax) are filed into one system. They can then be viewed or actioned by any user or group of users simultaneously across your network or internet.
Why Quality Management
Every business has goals, including sales, growth and good customer service.
Quality management improves an organisations effectiveness; establishes goals, measures performance and reviews how well it delivers products or services and ultimately customer satisfaction.
Compliance to standards and regulation is one of the biggest challenges to small and large organisations, along with audits or internal reviews to evaluate products and services are fit for purpose.
Corrective or preventative measures need to be in place when services fail to meet customer expectations, and continual improvement of products, services, working environment and staff development also play a part.
Download free “Secure Document and Quality Management Guide” to learn how you can help your business succeed through first class secure document and quality management