Looking to unlock a more productive workforce? Here’s how document management solutions can help.

The crushing weight of a mountain of paperwork. The stress of making sure the right people have the right documents so they can do their jobs efficiently. The frustration of spending hours looking for the right file to help you get an important project finished on time.

These are common pain points for any organization with disorganized document workflows. For businesses looking to take the next step in their path toward sustainable growth, they can form roadblocks that make completing even simple tasks difficult.

That’s where document management solutions come in. They can help you digitize your physical paperwork and set up automated workflows to reduce mistakes, boost productivity, and increase accountability. Here’s how.

How document management solutions drive sustainable growth

The goal of any technological solution is to make employees work smarter, not harder. This, in turn, allows businesses to make better decisions about how to dedicate available resources. The business can then use newly freed-up time, money, and energy to add new business units or expand ones that already exist.

Document management solutions can make most tasks involving physical and digital paperwork more efficient. Here’s how they can help you achieve your growth targets.

Faster processes

Physically printing and handing out documents. Manually copying data into the computer. Walking stacks of paper to the department in the building next door. All of these tasks take valuable time and effort that could be better spent on more meaningful work.

Meanwhile, automating and digitizing these processes ensures you don’t have to worry about whether or not important documents end up where they need to go. You can extract data from intake forms and create new digital records within seconds. Or, you can use digitization automations to help you manage larger projects, complete with cascading tasks and approval steps, so everyone involved knows exactly what they need to do.

Document management solutions are the key to implementing these sorts of automations, and can help to increase employee efficiency throughout your organization. In fact, Ricoh partner M-Files sees up to a 70% increase in productivity for customers who lean on its software to improve document and workflow management.

Reduced mistakes

Little mistakes can add up to become productivity-killing roadblocks. When you start scaling up from a few employees to hundreds, the possibility for mistakes increases exponentially.

Automation removes the possibility for introducing mistyped names or incorrect tagging and organization to ensure everything is where it needs to be with every single document. That way, you’ll be sure that every employee has the most accurate and up-to-date information at their disposal.

More accessible information

While physical filing systems have their place, they’re inconvenient for employees looking for information fast. In fact, one McKinsey report found that the average employee spends nearly 20% of their workday tracking down internal information necessary to do their jobs.

Document management solutions offer centralized repositories for digital information. These make it easier for anyone with the right credentials to look up what they need, whether they’re at their desk in the office or on a plane with their laptop. All you need to do is type your request in the search bar, like the name of a specific report, a client, or even a category like “expense receipts.” Your solution will automatically sift through reams of digital storage and surface the relevant information. Plus, it’ll provide any other documents related to your search request.

Greater accountability

Rather than wondering if your co-workers have completed their tasks or chasing down stakeholders for crucial sign-offs at project completion, document management solutions can track that information for you. They’ll automatically surface mission-critical tasks to the relevant party, along with any necessary documentation. They’ll also point out whether these tasks have been completed and store access and signature logs, allowing you to stay on top of every step of the process.

Did You Know?:If your organization has multiple locations, our remote distributed scanning solutions reduce the need for costly shipments while increasing efficiency

What to look for in a growth-focused document management solution

If you’re looking to prioritize growth, then any document management solution you use should be designed to reduce as much friction within your workflows as possible. To do this, you’ll need one that checks as many of the following boxes as possible.

A user-friendly interface

Having the best tech in the world won’t matter if your employees struggle to use it. A document management solution with a dedicated focus on streamlining the user experience will make it as easy as possible for everyone to upload and access business-critical information. It’ll also make onboarding new employees smoother, reducing the amount of time and resources it takes to train them on the proper workflows.

Industry-specific tools and features

While every business is unique, many of them share a need for features and workflows specific to their industries. For example, healthcare organizations will need to collect and store patient information according to a set of security and compliance standards.

When searching for a document management solution, look on the developer’s website to see if they already have tools and features in place for businesses within your industry. If so, that means they likely understand the unique pain points your industry faces and have thought deeply about ways to tackle them head on.

You still may need to customize a solution to meet the edge cases unique to your business, but a pre-configured solution will make integration virtually plug-and-play.

Scalability

As your business grows, you’ll want a solution that can grow with it. Being able to add on additional storage or user access should be a seamless process. Be sure to check on whether your solution makes upgrading simple and affordable even in the face of heavy document, customer, or user load.

Integrations with current systems

You probably use a lot of tools to get your work done. You’ve got email clients and word processing for the basics. Someone at your organization is probably already using some form of customer relationship manager and enterprise resource planning software to facilitate business. The last thing you want is friction between the systems you already use and the ones you add. Check on what integrations are available and see if they align with your current infrastructure to prevent incompatibilities.

Security and compliance safeguards

There’s a lot to juggle when it comes to maintaining a secure and compliant document management system. Doing it by hand is next to impossible. Instead, find out if your chosen solution has built-in systems to ensure that sensitive information remains safe from malicious actors.

Automated reviews can ensure that data remains secured and meets all compliance requirements, so check that your desired solution has them in place to make your security team’s jobs more manageable. This feature is especially important for businesses leveraging the flexibility of cloud document management solutions, as adding more devices and access points makes securing information and maintaining compliance that much more difficult.

Support for multiple devices

The modern workplace is scattered, from the bustling office to the coffee shop to the kitchen table at home. Desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets — each one has its own place in this ecosystem and should be able to retrieve and upload documents as easily as any other device. Having this flexibility will allow you to meet your employees where they are and improve how effective your document management solution is — especially as your business grows.

Did You Know?:Ricoh’s fi Series scanners make document management simple, thanks to high-resolution image quality and accurate OCR software features.

Need help? Ricoh can point you in the right direction.

A digital journey starts by knowing how to ask the right questions — and we can help you figure out what those questions are. Ricoh has decades of experience helping organizations like yours understand what their digital needs are and connecting them with hardware and software solutions to make their goals a reality.

Looking for the best place to start your digital upgrade? Download our free ebook Document Management Best Practices for the Modern Business today. Inside, you’ll find expert tips on ways to leverage document management solutions to boost productivity. And if you need more advice, don’t hesitate to reach out. We’ll help you find a solution that meets your unique needs.

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