I have been managing offices for more than two decades now, but the concept of a document management system has only recently come to my attention. For a long term, my staff and I had been struggling with juggling paper and digital documents. We were attempting to make the transition from the endless number of filing cabinets clogging up the office to the more modern online storage system on our computers, so this seemed ideal.
The idea of document management is to get all of your documents in the same place so that we’re not wasting time going through the paper filing cabinets and then trawling through all the folders on each individual computer. It’s incredibly easy to lose hours trying to track down that one crucial document you need to discuss with a customer or refer back to for a report, so we wanted a way to reduce the time wasted and make everything more efficient overall.
All of our paper documents were taking up space in our office which we needed for desk space for new staff, so the document management system means that all of these are scanned and uploaded into the same system as the rest of our digital documents. This is useful because we work closely with customers, and it helps us track our correspondence if we can see all of our paper letters alongside emails and call logs for a comprehensive overview of each case.
The appeal for me was that a third party takes care of everything for you. The idea of scanning each of the thousands of pieces of paper in our filing cabinet was incredibly daunting, so when we discovered someone else does the hard work for you it made it seem like a great option. They also promised to regularly back up our data. We are notoriously bad at remembering, and if our system crashed and we lost everything, we’d be able to access the backup data held by the company.
I had a few concerns about security as everything was stored in one place so if one thing was accessed or infected with a virus, this could affect everything else, but I was reassured that everything would be encrypted and covered by anti-virus software, so in fact this was a really safe system and we had nothing to worry about. We’ve been using the system for a few months now and we’ve seen productivity increase as the team waste less time hunting down what they need, so we’re highly impressed and consider ourselves document management system converts!
Claire Swindon is an office manager who has recently beocme a convert to the document management system solution