Knowhow Business Consultancy Services

Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS)

What is an Electronic Document Management System?

An Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) provides a structured environment for saving, retrieving, and tracking documents. In this context, a document is a file created by any of the most popular office software applications. It could be a letter created in Word, an Excel spreadsheet, a Visio flowchart, or even an Adobe Photoshop file.

Typically, EDMS solutions are integrated into the user's own familiar Microsoft Office environment so there is little learning curve involved in using the increased functionality provided by the EDMS.

Document Profiling

Every document that you create has a unique profile. The profile consists of several fields that are necessary to properly categorize and identify the document within the context of your business. Unlike a standard word processor, the document management system is capable of enforcing the use of a profile when a document is saved.

Document Check-out/Check-in

In a situation where multiple individuals are working on the same document (for example, a document going through a review process), an EDMS tracks who is working on a document at any given time. To work on a document, you must first "check it out", you then have control of that document. Once you are finished editing the document, you can then "check it in", and the document will be available for others to edit. When you have checked out a document, that same document is still available to others to read and they can use it to create a new document or new version-but they will not be able to overwrite your changes.

Document Versions

When working iteratively on a document, it is often useful to save previous versions. A document management system will let you do just that. It will track the latest revision and alert you if you should inadvertently open an earlier version. Most packages will allow you to attach a comment to each version.

Document Audit Trail

If you have ever been curious about who last edited a document, or wanted to know who has read a document that you created, a document management system will provide you that information. The system is able to track which people in your organization have accessed or edited a particular document, and when they did so. This feature is often helpful to understand the history of any particular document creation effort.

Document Security

There are some documents, such as an employee manual or your fax cover sheet, that all your staff may need to read - but only specific people should be able to edit. There may be other documents that are private or shared among a small group. Within an EDMS, you can set several levels of security for your documents. You might want to establish a certain set of documents that only some staff can see and work on. You might also want to establish a set of documents that certain staff can work on, but everyone else can see. Most packages let you create user groups and set up security on a per user, per group, and per document basis.

Document Indexing

The document management system indexes all the fields for all your document profiles. This provides you with fast response when you wish to search for, and retrieve, a particular document, or set of documents. A document management system can index every word in every document that it stores. This provides you with the ability to search through all your organizations documents for any documents that contain a particular word or phrase. In essence, your collection of documents is transformed into a searchable database. You can then tap into the information created by your organization in document form. Having this information will allow you to create better documents that build upon your organizational knowledge, rather than recreating the information that already exists. The speed at which you can access this information will often allow you to work more efficiently, thus serving your internal and external customers better.

Mobile User Support

If staff need their documents when out of the office, most document management packages allow users to select certain documents to work on with their laptops. When the users come back into the office and connect to the network, the document management system synchronizes their changes to those documents.

Web Support

Some packages provide remote users the ability to search for documents, check them out, and check them back in. All of this can be done through using a web browser. These same packages will take web capabilities one step further and allow you to share documents with your external clients and business partners.

Workflow

Most EDMS systems provide workflow functionality, which allows users to route documents to other users for one or more reviews, modifications and/or approvals. These tasks may need to be completed in a serial fashion (one after the other) or could be completed in parallel (at the same time), or perhaps a combination of some in serial and some in parallel. More complex or often repeated workflows can be built into templates based upon standard scenarios, which are executed when needed by attaching a document to the template and starting the workflow. The system then monitors progress through the workflow against pre-defined target timescales and can redirect the task to another user or raise alerts to responsible staff when a task is taking too long.

Paper Scanning

Scanning technologies provide the means to make paper documents available through an electronic system. By scanning documents into the EDMS and using Optical Character Recognition to convert the scanned image into text, documents previously in paper form can be searched for using a single search for electronic and scanned paper documents. Once scanned and made available in the EDMS, the documents can be retrieved and viewed through the online system without the need for access to the paper. Huge savings in time spent in file retrieval and replacement are possible. The paper originals can be either destroyed (where this is permissible) or stored in the off-site paper storage facility to reduce costs.

Importance of the ODMA Standard

The Open Document Management Architecture (ODMA) standard exists to provide a standard mechanism for desktop applications such as Microsoft Word, AutoCAD 2000 and Microsoft Visio to integrate with an EDMS. It is important to organisations that a selected EDMS product should support this standard because organisations may wish to implement new desktop technologies in the future with which they will wish to open from and save to the EDMS system. If both the EDMS and the desktop environments support this standard, then the desktop product will be able to access the EDMS out of the box, with no software development needed.

How Knowhow Consulting can help

Click here for details of the Document Management Consultancy services provided by Knowhow Consulting.

For assistance with identifying or fulfilling your Document Management needs, contact Knowhow either by phone on +44 (0) 1483 776000 or by email using info@knowhowconsulting.co.uk.