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Save 45% when you buy the CEO Series. It covers the ten core business processes and comes with nine fully-editable manuals for:
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Do You Really Need Document Management Software?
Policies and procedures need to be managed, not simply collected, as we oftentimes tend to do. Add in the offspring of policies and procedures — records — and you have the making of a problem common to business…a lack of control.
Control of records and documents is critical to compliance. ISO 9001 requires document control, record control, and specific procedures that clarify how you are maintaining control. HIPAA requires access control. Sarbanes-Oxley requires access and revision control. Document and record control are at the heart of many of the various compliance schemes businesses encounter.
If yours is a small business, you’re probably using one of two basic solutions: manual or server based file sharing to control your policies and procedures. The manual system consists of a series of file cabinets that contain your business policies, procedures, documents, and vital records.
Everyone is familiar with these legacy systems. In fact, most businesses still use these today, even though they may not be very secure, are hard to back up, and take up a lot of storage space (especially the older files that are kept offsite).  As a business grows, it may find that retrieving vital procedure documents and records can be a nightmare.  Yet, we stick with paper documents and filing systems because the up-front cost is considered inexpensive, paper is easy to use, and we’ve always used it.  Unfortunately, manual systems don’t scale very effectively — just ask your doctor.  But, what’s the alternative?
Modern businesses use some form of file server to store and share their policies, procedures, documents and records. A file server is often a shared hard drive on your local area network (LAN). Shared drives have several advantages over manual filing systems. They are searchable, don’t take up as much space, and can be made somewhat secure by restricting access using various file permission schemes. But, shared drives require training (to various degrees), it can be difficult to index non-text files (images), and they require back-up systems to prevent accidental changes or deletions.  And, as soon as you add an electronic back-up system, you’ve just increased the complexity of the solution dramatically.
Enter document management software. Using document management software provides more than just file serving. Your document management system (DMS) should provide the document and record control that most compliance standards require and do it in a more user-friendly environment. In other words, you should get more benefits for less work.
What do you get with document management software?
- Back-up / disaster recovery
- Security / access control
- Search / document retrieval
- Compliance / record control
- Revision / document control
- Approval / document workflow
- Consistency / ease-of-use and training
- Flexibility / scalability
- Filing / record scanning
Your document management system should resolve many of your document management and record control issues which, in turn, should provide the support for more effective policies and procedures deployment. If you’re not using document management software today, you should consider what you’re missing — and what you won’t miss once you’ve converted. Look around your office — if you have a lot of file cabinets in use, maybe it’s time to upgrade your document management system to the 21st century.  Maybe it’s time to start realizing the benefits of a modern document management software solution.
Related Articles:
- Is Your Office Paperless Yet?
- Intranet Policies and Procedures Development for Multiple Departments
- How Are You Managing Your Policies And Procedures?
- Why Implement an ISO 9001 Quality Management System?
- New Computer & Network Policies and Procedures Manual Helps Address Information Technology (IT) Management Issues
This and more articles like this can be found at www.bizmanualz.com. This article may be reprinted freely as long as this resource box is left intact.
January 31st, 2010 at 3:18 pm
Document management requires that the original paper document, if printed, be marked at the time of creation. This cannot be done with rubber stamps. This is being mistakenly overlooked in the name of electronic document management.
When documents are printed they are often done so without any branding or layer of protection. In a shared-printer environment, this is even more of a regular happening where they are left in printer trays for others to see or whatever. Information workers, temporary staff, guests and others may be walking by the printer where the document(s) are in full view.
Information becomes insecure and vulnerable in the absence of a reliable and straightforward method of document identification. In the event a document is misappropriated or misused, the consequences can be minor or catastrophic. Remember, most all PDFs originated from an unprotected Word document.
Unattended and unlabeled documents are an all to common event in daily business. We print documents for many of reasons — frequently without any form of label to reflect our intent to prevent misuse. Employing a rubber stamp in the margins of a document is a waste of time in ineffective.
The most efficient method of dealing with paper and PDF document management is to identify and label the document at the time it is printed. In the case of a PDF, the document marking should be done at the time it is created from Word. This requires both a method that is easily implemented and a policy requiring the action. If the PDF is not labeled or identified when it is created from Word, it requires a manual use manipulation and a PDF editing program to mark or stamp the document. Moreover, if the user wants to mark only selected pages of the PDF, each must be done individually which can be a tedious process.
As to the method, the document identification process must be thorough and capable of marking all the documents’ pages with appropriate and/or necessary indicia that is unalterable. The method must also be able to accept user-input to ensure that the marking is wholly appropriate for the document and handle extraordinary situations where truly custom stamps or legends are required.
While a stamp in the margin is better than no stamp at all, it doesn’t make much of an improvement over the antiquated rubber stamp. In order to be effective, the method must be automated. And the method must be capable of combining the text and the indicia in such a manner that it cannot be removed. User-friendliness is of paramount importance. If the use of the product requires data entry or command-line use, it is not likely to be used in an effective manner.
Visible watermarks, while good for intra-office work and controlled-print environments, are not the most secure form of document identification. The visible watermark, if in shaded gray, can be almost instantly removed by a contrast setting on any number of copy machines with that setting. Color watermarks are a little more secure method, but still are subject to removal in a similar manner.
Document marking that is embedded in the body/text of a document is the most reliable. This form of marking is where the indicia is the same color as the body text which prevents the removal-by-copier scenario. Under this condition there is no marking that can be covered or “contrasted” out of the document. This method provides the most paper document security in an document management program.
StampIt for Word is the method for automated document marking and is the solution for eliminating the use of rubber stamps or manually applied watermarks for paper document management.