You’re sitting at your desk when suddenly an urgent e-mail comes from your boss. She is requesting the latest version of a critical policy document she urgently needs for an upcoming meeting. No sweat, you will easily find it in your company’s document share drive. You begin by looking in the likely places starting with your department folder you think it should be in – no luck. No problem, you will just use the search box to find the document, typing in a predictable title. There are plenty of document matches for your search, but you know that none of them is the document you seek. Wish you had some kind of a document management system. Panic sets in and your boss are now calling your desk phone, as she is late for her meeting.
We’ve all been there, as intuitively as we think we have organized our company “shared” network folders, documents get lost, and frustration sets in. Whether it is neglecting to archive or delete the outdated version of documents, images, files, assets, etc. or employees orchestrating a confusing naming scheme for the folder structure – the point is this archaic means of organizing and managing documents/assets aren’t working for your company and it is costing you.
According to the Definitive Guide to America’s Most Broken Processes, a report by Nintex, 39% of the people interviewed out of 1,000 employees from various industries said they have a broken document management/sales processes within their organization and 49% said they have trouble locating documents.
Luckily, there is an easier way. With a document management system, organizations can store and track all of their documents in one, central location. The platform or software used for managing documents is called a document management system. Companies can use an intranet or other digital asset management software.
Here are 6 reasons why your company must have a document management system:
1) Increase Collaboration & Communication
Having a document management system in place promotes quicker and easier collaboration among employees, especially across geographic locations. By having the ability to quickly access documents and share them through an online workspace, such as an intranet, it allows users to work together on the same project with no hassle. Through other collaborative features included in your intranet software, these documents can be saved and shared among employees throughout the organization.
2) Reliable Document Version Control
For large organizations, maintaining updated documents and keeping information current can often be a struggle. Our customers often ran into that problem before moving to a document management system. By having document management software, it is easier to keep track of documents and keep them updated. Users can simply upload a document then manage the updates and versions online through their intranet. Our document management feature includes an automated archive and clean-up function to better organize and maintain documents.
3) Increase Time-Cost Savings
Ever heard the saying, “time is money”? If we go back to our scenario above, it took so long to locate a specific document, that the boss was late for her meeting. This is costing the organization man-hours and potentially costly mistakes with decision-making. Without arming managers with the best information available, they aren’t able to make the right decisions. By having all these documents organized and filed on your company intranet, it makes it much easier and faster to locate the right information. With a few clicks of the mouse, the document can be found and used accordingly. You can include Quick Links to popular or important documents on your intranet homepage to make the search even faster.
4) Eases Accessibility
With more and more people working from home or traveling for work, it is critical that they have access to specific documents or policies when they are not in the office. While some may argue that this is easily done with paper documents, there’s still a chance that halfway through your flight you realize you forgot something back at the office. Having these documents online and accessible from anywhere is more efficient and can save a lot of time and stress. With our Mobile Intranet application, we make your intranet available from your mobile device, making getting a certain document even easier, especially when you’re on the run.
5) Increase Productivity
Uploading, editing, tracking, and sharing documents take half the time with a Document Management system. Because of this, it enables employees to be more productive and ultimately more efficient. The time spent searching for documents through several different cabinets can now be used to get more work done. An intranet allows the company to store all its documents and data digitally in one organized place. This can be accessed on the intranet from any computer or mobile device with permission.
6) Keep Everyone Up To Date
Once your documents have been updated using our version control functionality, the next challenge is getting your staff to get in there and read the new policy. With our read and agree feature you can, with a couple of click of the mouse, select and notify everyone in your organization to let them know that they need to read the updated policy. You can even give them a deadline. If they decide to ignore the initial prompt, they are sent more automatically. This ensures they are not going to forget. At any time, you can pop into the policy assist area to check and see who has confirmed. Therefore, when you reach the deadline if you don’t have 100% completion, you know exactly where to follow up.
No more “I didn’t see the email”, ”I didn’t know that policy had changed” or “No one told me”. Everyone will be up to date and reading from the same page
Demo an Intranet Document Management System
See how an intranet helps with document management and employee engagement. Sign up for a free demo today! Not ready for a demo just yet? Take our complimentary internal communications assessment, and get a detailed report in 5 minutes.
