Over the past few weeks we’ve looked at the three stages of the document management lifecycle – and how online software supports how you manage your business documents. In the coming weeks, we’ll keep the theme going and look at how you can boost productivity around document-led business processes.
Let’s recap where we are. We’ve rolled up the three stages of document management into a single eBook. You can download it here. What are the three stages of document management? Let’s take a quick look.
Document Management: Create
Most business documents are a collaborative effort. Finance works with various departments to create budgets. Sales gets with legal, marketing, and services to pull together a proposal document. So, it’s no wonder that teamwork is so important.
Document management tools remove the complexity of managing versions, feedback, and more. You can upload a document, gather opinions in a dynamic activity feed, and avoid the chaos that comes from not controlling your numerous document versions.
Document Management: Organize
When you have ten thousand documents, it is a challenge to locate the document you need. Organizing documents should be easy so that you can focus on using your documents, and not on finding them. Document management tools should provide not only hierarchical approaches to organizing documents.
It should also provide more flexible ways to organize documents. That’s where metadata should be used to organize documents by date, product, business unit, or whatever makes sense to you. And it should provide the analytics you need to surface new and relevant content that can help your teams be more productive.
Document Management: Manage
Business-critical documents often go through a review and approval process. A contract may need to be reviewed by legal managers and the corporate counsel. But how do you know it has been checked by the right people. Workflows let you better manage documents by controlling who sees and approves a document before it becomes finalized.
Plus, audit trails keep you informed about who has OK’d a document and where it is in the approval process. And, as a document comes due for review, you and your team need to be alerted. Document lifecycle tools help you stay on top of expiring contracts and budgets that need to be verified.
Watch for more videos and content – and be sure to download the “Complete Document Management Lifecycle” paper.
