Enterprise document management is the strategy to oversee an organization’s paper and electronic documents so that they can be easily retrieved in case of a compliance audit or a subpoena. Initially, the term enterprise document management referred to the management of electronic documents created on a computer or paper documents scanned and brought into a digital format. The meaning has broadened to include images, email, internal-facing documents, company memos, and external documents like sales or marketing content. When it comes to regulatory compliance, enterprise document management addresses the following:
- How long must the business retain the documents?
- Where should the business store the documents?
- How can the documents be traced?
- How to recover documents in case of any disaster?
How Does an Enterprise Document Management Work?
An enterprise document management strategy empowers an organization to have a clear plan for the document management process. An organization can use in deciding how to receive, review, process, store, retrieve, and dispose documents. The EDM strategy determines how businesses should adjust the process to enhance efficiency. An organization can use a document management system for creating a single view of an enterprise’s documents and offer workflow tools for monitoring and controlling modifications.
As we grapple with today’s economic uncertainty, challenging labour markets, and fluid financial and capital markets, the productivity and efficiency gains of automating all types of document dependent work is vital. In this blog, we are going to take a deep dive into the reasons behind the importance of automating document-dependent work, especially during times of financial volatility.
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Efficiency & Cost Savings
There is no denying that businesses need to reduce operational costs while maximizing efficiency. Automating document-dependent work offers the opportunity to achieve both objectives. A continued dependency on manually completing document-driven tasks will lead to increasing overhead costs and inhibit growth. Replacing manual tasks with enterprise document management, a company can significantly reduce the time and costs on document-driven work. These include the labour hours. Also, it allows the employees to focus on higher-value tasks leading to beneficial outcomes and better business performance. Depending on use cases, the teams can recoup 20-50% of the team capacity by automating the document-dependent work.
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Better Employee & Customer Satisfaction
In today’s economic and labour situation, it is crucial to keep your best talent and the best customers. By automating document-driven processes, it is easy to enhance employee satisfaction by reducing the monotony and increase customer satisfaction by implementing modern and error-free processes.
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Risk Mitigation
During times of economic stress, the last thing that any organization would want are costly fines, litigations, and damage to the reputation that can be caused by security, compliance, or governance shortfalls. Automating the document-dependent work helps in mitigating the risks by ensuring higher accuracy and reduces the chances of human error. Automation sets up and maintains access control to enhance security, identify the discrepancies, ensure strict compliance with regulatory guidelines, and flag potential issues much more effectively than the manual process. Enterprise document management can take care of retention and other governance policies.
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Scalability & Flexibility
With the volatile markets of today, businesses must be agile and adaptable to respond to changing market conditions. This means, more than being able to think on their feet. Enterprise document management enables organizations to scale operations quickly and efficiently. This ensures they can cope with the fluctuating demand without incurring significant costs. In automated document-driven environments, this means they are flexible enough for adjusting invoices, billing, AR/AP operations in just a few seconds. Also, automated document processing systems offer flexibility to integrate with the existing systems. Thus, it becomes easier to implement at any time.
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Enhanced Data Analytics & Decision Making
Enterprise document management will not only save time and money but will also offer access to valuable data that can help in making informed decision. By extracting and organizing data from documents, these systems offer insights into trends, patterns, and potential areas of improvement. Businesses can leverage this data for making strategic decisions and navigate through uncertain economic landscape with higher confidence.
In Conclusion
Automating the document-dependent work is essential, especially in times of economic uncertainty. The benefits of automation include efficiency, cost savings, risk mitigation, flexibility, scalability, and higher data analytics to help businesses to enhance financial volatility, enhance operational performance, and maintain a competitive edge. As the global economy continues to evolve, it is crucial for organizations to embrace automation technologies in document management to thrive amidst the challenges that lie ahead.
