Small Business Document Management - The Important Issues To Be Considered
Most small business companies cannot afford to procure enterprise class business document management solutions. Definitely, special small business document management packages, designed to cater to the specific business document management needs of such companies, are required.
Document management systems small business companies need, must be customized differently for every such small business company, based on document management business case. For every such business case document management requirements will be different.
Through this article, we will endeavor to inform you about some important issues that small business document management needs to address.
Traditionally, small business companies have not succeeded in integrating data. Therefore, they have not been able to optimize the value addition that is inherent in usage of document scanning technology. In the small-to-medium-sized business (SMB) industry lack of awareness about information organization is a drain on monetary resources that also affects productivity. In such companies, a company office employee may take upto 40% of his total time on an average to just locate a document. Further, this knowledge is not transferred. This practice affects productivity as another employee, in the absence or resignation of such an employee, takes quite a long time to locate the same document. Another aspect in such companies is that documents are misfiled. Due to this, a company has to pay the cost which it incurs on account of such misfiling. The chances are high of the closure of such companies, if they are not able to recover lost data within a calendar day, due to such misfiling. A majority of such companies have also still not gone in for paper document conversion into digital form. A substantial chunk of the SMB companies does not back up data at all. Recovery plans are in place only in a miniscule percentage of these SMB companies. Some of these companies, based on half-baked knowledge, have installed only scanners. No information management plan has been implemented in many of these companies. So scan-and-store is only a part solution in these companies. Document archival is haphazard and no directory structure is in place for document storage. Manual searches are used to locate documents. In the absence of automation, which small business document management can provide, such companies have become laggards in business as they depend on probability to locate documents. Information in MS Word files, spreadsheets, and customer databases on individual desktops, does not match that in scanned documents. They are separate entities without any linking between them. Everything is done manually. The cost for this inefficiency is liable to be very high. In effect, productivity and profits in many SMB companies have been at best sluggish. Various such small business companies are pegged at various steps of the small business document management process ladder. Those that procured the cheapest scanners could not convert all their paper documents into digital form. Those that did procure sophisticated scanners are pegged at least higher, but still lack integration.
Privacy Policy >> Legal Disclaimer >> Contact
| 