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Scope of Management

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PCQ Bureau
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There are several types of document-management systems, so you need to choose one that fits your needs. By and large, these document-management systems can be broken up into three categories, which are based on where document management is needed the most. These are as follows: 

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- Converting from paper to electronic



- Processing just the electronic documents


- Converting from digital to paper

Within each of these, a wide range of solutions exists at various price points. There are also complete solutions that incorporate all three of these stages. Further still, there are solutions that go beyond even that, to build a complete workflow system in an organization. Let's see each in more detail. 

Paper to electronic



The simplest solution would be a PC with flatbed scanner and some software, which can simply be an OCR software, or some other basic document manager. This however, would have very limited usage and would therefore be meant only for people with very low volumes of paper documents. A publication for instance, could use it to scan in all the press releases it gets using an OCR package. Moving up, if the volume of paper is more, then you would need to add an ADF (Automatic Document Feeder) unit to the scanner. Further still, if there's lots of paper of different shapes, texture, and size, then you would need a dedicated document scanner, along with a document-management software. There's a whole range of document scanners available, from tiny desktop models to large workhorses that could be used by an entire office. If the organization has huge volumes of paper documents like old records, receipts, applications and vouchers, ledgers, such as a government department or bank, then of course, other parameters need to be considered. These include the type and amount of storage space required (more on this in a later article) to store all the documents along with an archival and/or quick retrieval system. Further, the retrieval system needs good searching and indexing capabilities to be effective.

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Processing electronic documents



The second part of document management is managing the electronic documents themselves. It could be a follow on from the first step wherein you've scanned in paper documents and now need a solution to manage their electronic version. Alternately, you need a system to manage the ever-growing electronic documents in your office in general. Any organization has millions of files lying in a variety of document formats, eg Word files, spreadsheets, invoices from accounting or ERP application. Plus, it's all lying in multiple pools of storage. All this makes it difficult to track what's where, which in turn makes it difficult to search and retrieve the needed information. For example, suppose your company need to retrieve your last five years' tax returns (perhaps for an external audit). Or your star sales man leaves for greener pastures, and you desperately need a copy of a big proposal he'd passed on to a client. Did it get deleted with his mailbox? Or did you back up all his data to a central system for easy retrieval? Even if you had backed it up along with other documents, searching and retrieving that file could be a hair raising experience. 

This is where a document-management system that's good at handling electronic documents alone comes into the picture. The simplest and cheapest solution here are the desktop-search tools that recently gained popularity, most of which are free. These do indexing of all files on your system so that you can quickly and easily retrieve anything you need. However, these are only personal desktop solutions. An enterprise-wide solution would be something that also allows you to standardize on a particular format, say PDF. All documents are then shared on this format only, and shared seamlessly by everyone. Yet another challenge here would be the conversion from different formats to a standard one. Further still, if multiple people work on the same document, then version control becomes a major issue here. 

Features of a DMS
A document management system can be made up of any or all of the following elements: 



- Hardware like printers and scanners


- Indexing software


- Version control


- Full text search capabilities


- Document security


- Storage and archiving


- Integration with existing systems/compatibility


- E-mail management


- Desktop document search tools







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From digital to paper



This may seem odd at first, but just think of all the printouts users take in your office every day. Have you ever considered how much paper do they actually consume? Could there be ways and means of reducing this paper wastage? If your office has heavy faxing requirements, then you would need to keep track of how many faxes have been sent and to whom. Faxes could be sent in a number of ways. You might first take a printout and then go to the fax machine and send it out. You could also use a Fax modem to avoid taking prints. These are all good as long as the volumes are low. But what if the volumes are high? This is where large MFDs come into the picture, which can print, copy, scan and fax in large numbers. So much so, that they can be considered as the central communication hub of an office. These devices have built lots of good capabilities over time. So you could for instance, photocopy a document and e-mail it across to multiple people right away, because the MFD has a built-in SMTP server. You could fire a print, but later also realize that it needs to be faxed. The MFD can do that as well, because it has built-in storage space. Moreover, this can be allocated to different users such that each user gets a separate mailbox to store all documents.

Beyond basic document management



Lastly, we come to the stage where you've already implemented a document-management system, but it's somehow not able to fulfill all your requirements. Collaboration for instance is becoming a problem. This can happen in organizations where documents have to move from one desk to another in a pre-defined manner. The loan application in a bank for instance moves across various desks. You would fill up the form and submit all the relevant documents to a bank executive, who would then pass the application to different people. Somebody would verify your credentials and track record, while another would check all the documents you submitted. Finally, it would all go to the manager who would then approve the loan. In such a system, what's needed is more than just document management. Not only do you need to convert the paper application form to an electronic document and scan all supporting documents, you also need to move them across different desks in a pre-defined timely fashion. This is where a workflow system needs to be deployed. 

As you can see, document management is possible at different stages. You need to decide the stage based on the challenges you face.

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