Document Management

When one thinks about threats to organizational security, the words hackers and computer viruses come to mind. In this world of network attacks, printers, copiers and fax machines are easy to overlook. These systems can store trade secrets, financial and medical information, and valuable information like customer lists or pricing schedules. Loss of this information could be devastating.

The good news is that there are practical steps you can take to improve the security of your printers and copiers.

1. Track Printing Access

Output tracking technologies can keep a record of which documents are printed. You can access the printing logs to see what documents an employee has printed. Your staff will know that the company is monitoring information security thus creating an environment where employees are hesitant to steal information through the printer.

2. Encrypt Hard Drives on Multifunction Systems

When you scan a document on a multifunction system the scanned image is stored on the device’s hard drive before it is sent off to an email address or network folder location. New security technologies can encrypt documents on the multifunction system’s hard drive and make sure files are erased after they have been transmitted.

Are you looking for ways to improve and streamline your business processes? A great place to start is to evaluate your current business practices.

A business process is a structured series of steps that produces a repeated outcome. Accounts receivable—what happens from the time you generate an invoice until you get paid—is the most common business process. These paper and digital documents are the vehicles by which information flows through your business regardless of what industry you are in.

Technology will improve your business and streamline the flow of information to:

• Increase Profits
• Enhance Competitive Advantage
• Improve Customer Service
• Ensure Regulatory Compliance

For over thirty years we’ve been moving towards the lofty goal of the paperless office. But as the volume of computer data grows, so too does our paper usage.

Fortunately there seems to be a valid movement toward cutting back on our paper usage with Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS). This system allows you to scan all your paper documents to create a searchable and secure filing system.

There are several trends are driving the rapid adoption of this technology:

· Low Costs of Electronic Storage. It is now possible to store 10 filing cabinets full of paper in one gigabyte of electronic storage.

· Familiarity with Computer Applications. Today, everyone is trained to be familiar with common computer applications. This means adoption time and training for new applications is minimal.

· High Speed Scanners and Multifunction Copiers. Documents can be scanned quickly and conveniently with sheet-fed scanners, available on most new digital office copiers.

Document costs increase every year thanks to the growing volume of information. These costs include everything from printing and copying to the infrastructure needed to store and retrieve critical information.

Recent research by InfoTrends found that overall expenditures on documents were 6% of annual revenues.

Fortunately there are several practical strategies for medium and small businesses you can employ to reduce your document costs:

Multifunction Systems

New workgroup multifunction systems can provide full color printing, copying, faxing, and scanning services in one device.

Multifunction systems are less expensive to operate than laser printers especially when it comes to color output. These systems operate on low cost-per-page agreements that include supplies, preventative maintenance, and on-site service. The net result is lower output costs.

Printer Management

In many offices, 80% of document output is attributed to printing. A recent study by Hewlett-Packard showed that a properly-managed printing environment can cut printing costs by 8-42. The first step is to understand your actual printing expense.

Lower your business’ costs and begin printing your marketing materials in house.

Customize your marketing materials and take advantage of on-demand printing. This will eliminate the need for expensive bulk orders of generic brochures and the unnecessary waste of replacing obsolete brochures.

Consider creating a Marketing library that will enable your sales and marketing employees to access marketing documents from a network folder. They will be able to open, revise and print the materials according the specific client you are working with.

Review these suggestions and make your in-house marketing materials more effective.

· Be sure to use a cost-effective color printer or multifunctional copier. Some systems can allow 20-page documents to be printed in less than one minute.

A new report by Datamonitor argues that many organizations waste 10% of their staff costs because employees can not find the right information to do their jobs. Over 50% of staff costs are now for employees performing “information work”. But the employees are suffering from both information overload and information underload, and as a result they spend up to 25% of their day searching for the right information. Datamonitor argues that this why some organizations could be frittering away as much as 10% of their staff costs on wasted effort.

By Corey Smith

eWeek posted today a great article titled, How to Choose the Best E-mail Archiving Solution for Your Enterprise.

An increasing number of enterprises are investigating e-mail archiving solutions due to regulatory compliance, legal discovery and storage management issues. Understanding how to evaluate these e-mail archiving solutions is critical if you want to effectively address these business challenges.

If you understand the options for email archiving and how they apply to electronic document management, you can increase efficiency in your business and provide savings to your bottom line.

By James True

The Small-to-Medium (SMB) business segment may be one of the most misunderstood markets ever. Vendors erroneously assume SMB is a large, undifferentiated market that is easy to sell into, especially compared to large enterprises, where big brands and massive corporate sales forces are needed to get a foot in the door.

In fact, SMBs vary substantially in their technology needs. The smaller prospect is very different than the larger mid-sized firm in terms of the technologies they can use as well as how they buy, support and implement these technologies. The differences between small and mid-sized companies are well-illustrated by their document management technology needs. In particular, integrating electronic document management technology with the business applications commonly used by the small enterprise poses a special challenge.

By Corey Smith

Tristam Wallace, at the Document Imaging Blog, had a very interesting post on SharePoint and Document Imaging. I think that one of the most common misconceptions is that if you have SharePoint in your office that you have a fully featured document imaging system.

SharePoint can certainly help increase your productivity through collaboration and document storage, but if you have a lot of unstructured data (documents that have been scanned), you probably need to look at integrating your document imaging system (capture/scanning or storage) with SharePoint to help your employees increase their document management productivity.

By utilizing DocuWare, Bozeman Deaconess Hospital has saved $20,000 a month! Patient care has improved significantly and wait times have been reduced because information is readily available to both patients and staff. DocuWare is being used to manage outpatient lab records across a multi-site environment, collect payments from insurance companies faster, as well as store radiology scripts, insurance cards and signed release forms.

Bozeman Deaconess Hospital’s primary objective is providing quality healthcare to individuals and their families. The hospital is an 86-bed, full service, not-for-profit hospital located in Bozeman, Montana, serving 85,000 people in a 90 mile radius and drawing additional patients from surrounding counties.

As the medical needs of the community grew, the hospital expanded its services to allow patients to have lab work done in any one of three locations. The pressing need for a better way to manage patient records and laboratory results across a multi-site system caused the hospital to investigate implementing an electronic document management system not only for the laboratory, but for other areas of the hospital as well.