An ideal office is one which is clutter free and neat and clean. But how often do we see piles of paper on tables? Very often indeed. While we may try and store the important documents neatly, it means using expensive real estate to store these documents. And retrieving a particular document is a tall order. It calls for going through multiple files and multiple pages… Almost like finding a needle in a haystack. According to Gartner Research, on an average it takes 18 minutes to search for a document. Not only that, they also have found that on an average professionals spend 50% of their time looking for information.
So how does one over come this challenge? The answer is an Electronic Document Management System (EDMS). EDMS can change the way in which your business functions. Whether you are looking for a simple method to improve the way you handle important paper based documents or handling electronic files generated by users on their computer systems, an EDMS is able to provide various advantages for organisations of all sizes.
What does an EDMS entail?
Capturing – Using a good scanner, the first step is to transform the paper based documents also called hard copies into electronic format. There are software plug-ins that can help improve the quality of the scanned images (noise reduction) and can also turn upside down images which are scanned in the wrong direction.
Indexing – Once you have tens of thousands of documents scanned into the computer, tracking them and keeping them organised is the next challenge. Index fields or unique identifiers for each document or a group of documents shall be entered which will help in classification. This in turn saves precious time.
Retrieval – EDMS makes the entire process of retrieving the required documents very simple. One can enter the keyword search and the system will bring up one or more documents that match the criteria in a very short span of time. It is also possible to use a combination of keywords or even using Boolean method of searching.
With contributions from Ashish Baby and Harshad Thakkar