How Does a Document Management System Work?
A document management system is a system that is used to receive, store, manage & track data to reduce the use of paper. In another term, a document management system is a software system that is used to track, manage & store electronic images & documents captured through the document scanner.
A good document management system helps organize our data & files, speeds up workflow, improves accuracy, and provides access to document from any part of the world.
The documents management system also helps to reduce storage space, improves regulatory compliances, eases up the retrieval process, and enhances security.
In this article, we will discuss briefly how the document management system works.
Document Capture
Document capture refers to save documents so that it can be found later. This means indexing. Indexing is a way to classify a document by add terms to the document’s metadata, like order number or customer number. Such indexes make it easier to find documents later.
Emails
The document management system helps to create a setting to automatically import email messages or attachments into a specific folder.
Paper
Document management system takes documents from the high-speed scanner and indexing and added by hand or by zonal optical character recognition (OCR), enterprise resource planning (ERP) integration, or bar-coding.
External applications
The document management system allows importing data on external applications like ERP software or customer relationship management (CRM) that produce documents
Document Retrieval
The document management system gives the search features to be retrieved a document on any keyword search. This happens due to indexing. Using the right index keys ensures the retrieving of a document. The document retrieval needs to be quick and easy.
Document Distribution
Document management system gives the ability to distribute documents, i.e., email and FTP. The document distribution is a key component of any document management system. It’s the only way to send documents to customers, vendors, and even employees.
Document Security
Document security is as important as central access. The document management system gives security in two main ways.
First of all, it incorporates version control. For some documents, one must have the ability to make revisions by checking a document out by revising if they are made in error. And that means tracking what changes were made when.
Secondly, the document management system includes permissions so you can control access. This means it can be controlled who can access what documents. Also, it can be defined as user rights to author, route, revise, view, or delete documents.
Document Information Availability
The document management system retrieves the archived file at any time and gains access to documents for the users by using the metadata. On the other hand, file management uses a document management system to find what one is looking for takes only a few seconds within the windows explorer. However, one needs reliable text recognition and a powerful integrated full-text search to ensure this. So the structured & unstructured information is available in the document management system.
Workflow Management
As there is a possibility of semi-automatic or ad hoc workflows, it shouldn’t be considered as a rigid entity. Since it is seamlessly logged by the system, it reduces the document throughput time & increases the transparency of each processing step.
Employees can also go through the documents during the whole processing, even if they are not involved in the workflow. One can never send the document around; a link is available for the document to be accessed in the document management system.
Also Read: Issues and Challenges of Lotus Notes to Office 365 Migration
Digitizing the paper records may seem like tremendous work but the document management system not only makes it manageable but also improves the businesses the way they operate by giving them time to focus on more weak areas of the businesses.
