
A document management system is a software solution allowing businesses to collate, share and amend documents digitally. This helps negate the need for countless paper documents, unwieldly filing cabinets as well as the endless man hours, filing and retrieving documents.
How can a document management system add value?
Document Management Systems bring a number of values to any business, increasing productivity and efficiency as well as reducing costs. There does also seem to be one overriding theme however, and this is security. Below we have listed 7 key security reasons for implementing a document management system;
Reason 1 – Reduced need for email
Reason 2 – Collaboration
Document management systems can facilitate the authoring, reviewing and approval of documents by giving users visibility of where documents currently are, in its lifecycle. This is an important security feature when it comes to the reputation of your business as it can prevent misidentified, incomplete, inaccurate and unapproved documentation from reaching clients.
Reason 3 – Reducing Human error
Reason 4 – Compliance
Reason 5 – Version Control
Document Management Systems leave a full audit trail on all files, documenting exactly who has edited these and what changes have been made, whilst simultaneously keeping a fully accessible log of all previous versions.
Most people can relate to a time when damaging changes were accidently made and saved to an important document, making it impossible to retrieve the original version. These systems can prevent this from happening, saving the loss of important documents.
Reason 6 - Back up
Reason 7 – Access Permissions
Records management is once again a key business issue, due to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into force in May 2018. No organisation can ignore this, given that potentially penalties for non-compliance can be up to four per cent of an organisation’s global revenue. Clearly, via this directive, the European Commission is aiming to drive organisations to make data protection a key business function.