Improvement of operational efficiency

White collar workers, in particular, handle a wide variety of business documents, so it is urgent to review document management and related operations. In business, document management is the management of a document's flow from creation through retention and disposal.

Depending on the type and content of the document, some documents are required by law to be stored for several years, rather than at the memo level, where they can be disposed of immediately after use. By properly sorting and categorizing these items and making them available at all times, we can expect to improve business efficiency. However, while some companies are using structured data such as CRM and ERP, many are still unable to effectively use unstructured data such as documents and content scattered on internal servers and cloud storage.

Challenge(1)：Files take longer to find (faster & easier searching with indexing)

Challenge

Have you ever had trouble finding the file you made?

In general, about 30% of white-collar work hours are spent looking for information. As we all understand, if you make a rough classification, you can't make effective use of documents. Therefore, many people use a variety of techniques, such as naming folders and file names in a meaningful way, grouping them by type, and keeping them in chronological order. However, there are quite a few people who have experienced not being able to find a file when they need it. Even personal computers are in this situation, so if a shared server is accessed by multiple employees, the difficulty is even greater. Document management within a company is likely to become increasingly confusing, as unwanted content continues to persist without being deleted, and servers are scattered across departments.

Solution

How do you manage your files to make it easier to find business documents?
If you're using a common shared server or online storage, you may only be able to sort through folders or give them descriptive file names.

However, with ECM, you can tag information as if it were a sticky note on a document, making it more searchable.

For example, if you manage invoices and have information such as Invoice No, Company, Billing Address, Phone Number, and Issue Date as document properties, you can use that as a key for easy searching. You can also set this tag information for image data and audio files.

For example, you can manage photos of real estate properties by property ID, and you can manage recorded data of meetings by associating them with deals. Versioning also makes it easy to see which ones are up to date, even if they've been updated repeatedly.

With these ECM-specific search capabilities, agents can quickly find the right documents and data when they need it.

Challenge(2)：The person in charge creates documents with similar contents many times (similar documents are easily found by searching in the file).

Challenge

I want to make a proposal using data I've seen somewhere, but I don't know where it is or who made it, so I ended up making it from scratch.

Have you ever experienced that? Nothing is more wasteful than making similar materials from scratch. Information sharing on shared servers and online storage is limited in searchability, so there is a problem that data created in the past cannot be fully utilized. Therefore, many companies have used analog methods such as information exchange meetings and regular meetings to cover the inconvenience. But unless we change our inefficient ways of relying on memory, it will be difficult to improve productivity and operational efficiency.

Solution

Many companies stock files on shared servers or online storage to share information among employees.

However, if it's a document that you created, you don't know it, and it's difficult to find the information you want from documents that others created. Basically, you don't know the contents of a file until you open it, and it's hard to guess its contents from the folder hierarchy or the file name.

However, ECM can provide file properties called meta information, which describes what data the file contains, making it easy to search for documents created by anyone. For example, if you search by the product name and the keyword "proposal," you can pick up proposal data created by someone in the sales department in the past. This advanced search function can be used in a variety of business situations, such as when searching for contract templates and when creating meeting materials, and can greatly contribute to increasing employee productivity.

Challenge (3): Document disposition is tedious (set disposition timing and delete automatically)

Challenge

Does your company properly dispose of or delete business documents that are no longer needed?

There are a lot of documents being created every day in the business, but if you just keep piling them up in a chaotic way, you can't expect to be more efficient. In addition, documents that are no longer needed must be properly deleted at the right time, or various risks arise.

For example, privacy data such as employee's My Number and medical examination results must be deleted when the employee leaves the company, and confidential information and materials received from the client must be deleted when the contract with the client expires. If you don't take regular inventory of documents that have passed the legal time limit, your server will be flooded with unnecessary data.

Solution

Documents that are no longer in their role or archives that have expired must be destroyed or deleted without fail, but doing so manually can be tedious.

The advantage of ECM is that the entire lifecycle of a document, from creation to disposition, can be managed and automated for each piece of content. For example, you can set an expiration date on a document and automatically delete it when it reaches that date, or you can incorporate it into a workflow to automatically delete data about an employee after HR completes the termination process. Leaving the system to do the tedious work of taking inventory and deleting documents, especially those that have passed their statutory retention period, frees you from the hassle. If you're concerned about "automatic removal by the system," you can send an e-mail to notify the person in charge that it's time to remove it, and then confirm the content and remove it after approval.

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