Document-management software leads to paperless efficiency
By Maria Varmazis -- Purchasing, 2/14/2008 2:00:00 AM
It's a familiar situation in any office: you're looking for that important file or document, but you don't know whose desk it's on. Or you finally find the document, but you don't know who has worked on it lately or what changes were made. One increasingly popular approach to tracking a document as it goes through changes is the use of document-management software. Such software can act as a virtual filing cabinet, keeping track of where a file is in a workflow, but it can do much more than that as well. For many companies, document-management software is a big step in the direction of a paperless office. For others, it gives office workers the ability to track and search documents for important data while complying with federal documentation guidelines.
Steve Parker, the senior business development manager at Maynard, Mass.-based Stratus, had a paperwork issue. When the Stratus sales team came in with new customer agreements, important documents got lost in the daily shuffle. "Imagine a vice president of sales has five new sales agreements and he has to scour around his desk to find the folder to read and review and hope everything's been done right leading up to that," Parker says. Stratus' sales team also used Salesforce.com extensively to manage leads and campaigns, but there was a disconnect between the activities online and the follow-up on paper.
At first, Parker looked into contract management software to get a better handle on the largely paper process of creating and modifying sales agreements, but found the cost was too prohibitive for the scale he was looking for. He narrowed his focus to document-management software specifically. One of the major selling points for Spring CM, the software he eventually decided upon, was its ability to link up with Salesforce.com, essentially getting rid of the disconnect between sales leads and sales agreement creation.
"With the whole notion of contract lifecycle management, there were probably a dozen or so companies we talked to that could help better manage contract routing and approval but not necessarily document creation," says Parker. "With the document-management system we chose, it could create documents as well as interact with the sales team through Salesforce.com."
Spring CM tool is Web-based, so in a sense their office documents weren't just paperless; they were easily integrated with former online processes. A staff member on the sales team no longer has to jump from one tool to another at different parts of the sale if they're adding a new customer, for instance, they can create a new document and track its progress, all while still in their usual Salesforce.com interface.
Parker says this has had a dramatic effect on overall efficiency within his office—he no longer receives calls from colleagues wondering where contracts are and who has them. "Before we went with the document management software, I'd manage my workload with an Excel spreadsheet, and if someone had called I'd go to that spreadsheet and it was time consuming to update," he says. "Now I can look at all of the accounts and agreements and tell whose desk they're on."
Routing documents through the management software has cut down on redundancies and confusion on paperwork as well. Most document management software emphasizes streamlining an office's workflow—meaning a document is clearly marked in every stage of its progress. The more sensitive the file, such as a sales contract, the more important features such as clear approval and routing settings are. In Stratus' case, many of the files in its document management system need to be routed through several departments, such as marketing, legal and sales, and each department needs to give its approval for the document before it can move forward. The last thing anyone needs is to spend hours working over an approval of an already out-of-date document.
"One of the things about workflow that's important is the ability to lock down a document so multiple people aren't making changes to something at the same time," says Parker. "All of this makes it much more visible to others about what's going on with the document."
Another important feature of document management that's driving adoption goes hand-in-hand with paperless documentation: searchability. When a document is scanned and entered into a document-management system, it's not just a picture of the paper document. All of its text becomes indexed and searchable in a database for later retrieval.
David Yeskel, systems analyst for the city of Santa Monica, Calif., says that the city's government aimed to do just that when it started migrating to a new document management system in late 2005. "We had a large back-file of building permit-related records going back to the 1920s—literally millions of pages of paper that we wanted to make sure we could protect over time and make easily searchable," says Yeskel.
That wasn't the only issue, though. New federal guidelines from the Department of Defense mandated record retention requirements, and the old document-management system used optical disks to store data, which are slow and prone to deterioration. "We had to sit down and develop a detailed list of requirements, analyze our current business processes and project what we'd want to do within the next five to ten years," says Yeskel.
With two key criteria in mind—searchability and long-term accessibility—Yeskel and a committee within the city of Santa Monica sent out RFPs to a number of document-management companies. Many of the responses the city received were too large for the scale Yeskel had in mind, even though they had the functions he was looking for. "All of these systems primarily do the same thing in different ways, which is document and storage retrieval, full-text searching, and workflow—basically the process of moving a document through an organization," he says.
In the end, the city went with Laserfiche software. A deciding factor was that Laserfiche scaled its solution to the size the city needed as well as helped implement the software to get document management operating as quickly as possible. Within six months the Laserfiche system, which is accessible online, was up and running for use within the city's administration. "We can give our users a URL on our intranet, and they're automatically logged in to Laserfiche," Yeskel says. "There's no software for us to install and our annual software maintenance is half of what it was."
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