How to Optimize Business Processes with Digitally Archived Documents

While crafting a promising business strategy, many well-run organizations today consider digital archiving as a comprehensive solution for the company’s enterprise content management to achieve target goals and gain long term competitive edge in the growing market rivalry. 

With the passage of time, essential documents such as letters, projects documentation, contract papers, invoices, orders, and emails pile up to large volumes and consequently occupy a lot of storage capacity of the on-premise archiving facility.

In addition, manual search in stuffy racks of your office is not only a laborious and stressful task for a firm’s administrative personals but also significantly time-consuming to dig out any required file.

On the contrary, archiving documents digitally address all aforesaid issues that are associated with traditional physical records management practices.

Therefore, adopting effective records management services triggers business processes optimization and streamlines organizational workflow. 

Let’s dive into specifics and take a more elaborative approach to explain that how archiving documents in a digital library accelerates business activities, bring the ease of records retention and timely acquisition of valuable data for several purposes.

1. eDocumentation- What lies beyond just record’s archiving?

The term records-archiving is pretty much self-explanatory. However, there are so many undeniable perks that come with electronic archiving of documents on a digital platform.

Companies typically come across various activities or processes to reach their strategic goals. These business processes involve creating and receiving a large number of documents on a daily basis.

Apparently, the multi-functionality of advanced electronic records archiving today makes it more than what traditional archiving agencies used to be.

Apart from records security, ease of access, and easier retrieval, workflow automation is one of the most rewarding solutions that digital archiving agencies provide to organizations that carry out paper-intensive operations.

2. Your data- Under your fingertips 

With the increasing mobility of consumers, instant access to data virtually from anywhere in the world is need of the day.

Been on your vacation or commuting in air, eArchiving firms facilitate you with complete autonomy to access and utilize your electronically archived data with any portable device in hand, 24/7.

Records readily available right on time facilitates companies with making well-informed judgments and speed up decision-making processes.

3. Workflow automation 

As automation continues to emerge in almost every business workplace, the integration of eArchiving is potentially eliminating all hinders that decelerate workflow and efficiency of business activities.

Business processes normally involve the movement of files from the company premises to third parties, sharing records with other departments of a company, and from person to person exchange of documents.

It significantly reduces retrieval time consumption for administrative personals, decreases labor associated costs, and improves process-accuracy when your data is just one click away.

4. Business processes optimization

One of the highly anticipated advantages of eArchiving is to accelerate repetitive business operations. Key features of electronic archiving in workflow optimization include: 

• Generating workflow history and reporting daily actions performed.

• Propagating automatic email notifications among multiple users as the workflow proceeds.

• Set notifications for due dates and overdue tasks for workflow steps.

• Setting alarms for carrying out certain tasks of the workflow to be completed within a short time frame. 

• Defining automatic actions to be performed on documents once a workflow process is initiated, finished, or in the transition from one step to another. 

• Allowing multiple e-signatures on a file for reviews or approvals. 

• Initiate reminders for all pending activities with a single click. 

• Prioritizing daily workflow steps to initiate steady business operations. 

• Export documents and reports automatically to any specific location.

• Limiting user access and hiding workflow files that undergo approval or revision processes. 

• Auto creation of PDF versions during the workflow processes. 

• Share reference files with workflow members to aid them in decision-making processes. 

• Allowing the user to make on-time comments and suggestion as workflow proceeds.

• Incorporating centralized quick search capability for documents and creation of reports. 

• Assigning administrative access to specific participants, workflow initiators, or managers. 

• Copy/Move files during workflows to an existing folder or new electronic catalogs. 

• Generating reports on daily workflow to figure out problem-areas that affect the speed of business processes. 

• Allow participants to delegate workflow activities with other concerned users that work remotely. 

Typically, firms on a daily basis come to deal with documents for multiple purposes. For instance;

• Exchange of essential files among different stakeholders for various decision-making processes. 

• Backtracking historical records for outlining future business strategies.

• Pinging clients with their project’s progress updates and generating feedback.

• Incoming and outgoing invoices. 

• Research and market survey records. 

• Email correspondences and customer relationship management documentation.

• Contracts, partnership deeds, and audit-related documents. 

• Documents related HR operations, legal and litigation proceedings. 

5. Electronic documents management system implementation

The steady flow of documents across multiple users significantly strengthens business activities and enhances service quality.

There are few steps involved in implementing a robust electronic documents management system that speeds up day to day business operations for just about any organization. 

Documents Creation: Paper documents are converted into an electronic form through scanning and optical character recognition processing.

Documents Modification: Electronic document repositories allow their clients with rights to modify, update, and make necessary amendments in business records. 

Documents Versioning: Different content management software keeps tracking the changes being made in documents.

By enabling the documents versioning feature, a workflow manager can easily go back to the original file for making progress comparisons. 

Document Storage: Electronically scanned documents are stored in hard drives of the data center or cloud that enable complete security for a definite lifecycle. 

Collaboration: One of the most rewarding experiences that come with electronic management of documents is to allow files to be shared with other concerned users either within or outside of the company premises.

Features like check-in and check-out enable multiple users to access and work on a document for reaching certain objectives. 

Access Rights: Administrative access rights are given to different users such as read-only permission, read and write permission to utilize the record as needed. 

Digital Signatures: To authenticate documents just like signing paper documents, the idea of digital signatures enables them to submit documents with e-signatures to ensure authenticity and integrity and validity of documents.  

Storage Scalability: As data grows with time, requiring more storage space.

Digital libraries provide businesses with storage capacities as per their demand. A firm can opt for storage capacity in gigabits and terabits. 

Eliminating Delay Factor: Delays are destructive and ultimately eat into firms’ overall productivity. Typically, manual records trail is quite often prone to various process delays and human errors.

These undesirable delays consequently cause undesirable delays and slow down business operations.  However, eArchiving is totally automated and free of human errors and promptly accessible. 

Backup and Recovery: In case of accidental loss or unintentional deletion of a file, eArchiving agencies facilitate firms with immediate data recovery solutions. 

Conclusion

Electronically archived documents not only ensure data preservation measures but also enable business processes optimization within a company.

Convenient access to data allows administrative personals to automate workflow, business processes, and make documents flow fully optimized. 

The smooth and steady flow of information and documents among all stakeholders helps in making well-informed judgments to be efficient and productive as the workflow progresses.