Every company has documents—regardless of industry. It’s a fact of business life.
More and more companies are choosing to deal with documents electronically and go paperless where possible. However, not every company has successfully mastered managing digital documents. That’s where an electronic document management system comes in.
Fortra Document Management delivers solutions that will speed up your document processes and make it easy to capture, manage, and distribute your documents digitally.
Here, we relay the answers to the most common questions we receive from future Fortra customers. We hope this FAQ will help you decide if implementing an electronic document management system is the right choice for your company.
Why would we need an electronic document management system?
Simply put, an electronic document management system is the most efficient way to capture, manage, and distribute documents.
With it, you will:
- Retrieve documents faster than ever
- Always know where your documents are
- Reduce paper, printing, and storage costs
- Save time and boost productivity
Do you need a document management system? Take the assessment >
How much time will we actually save?
More time than you might expect. A typical employee spends 30–40% of his or her time searching for documents—in email, hard drives, and filing cabinets. This doesn’t factor in subsequent time it will take to scan, copy, send, or re-file the document.
Wouldn’t it be nice to get that time back and put it to better use? With the right document management system, you can!
Is going paperless a realistic goal?
Your office may never go completely paperless. But you can reduce your paper dependency by removing paper from your key document processes.
Documents that arrive electronically will stay electronic. Paper documents can be digitally captured—and then safely shredded and recycled.
Once a document is electronically captured, there’s no need for paper to enter the picture again. Documents can be digitally routed for approval within the document management system. Plus, automatic delivery eliminates the need for printing the final document for customers or vendors.
But we already scan documents. Isn’t that enough?
Scanning documents only takes care of one content type—paper—and paper isn’t the only way documents arrive at your company. What are you doing about the rest of them?
Scanning doesn’t take care of: emails, PC and network files, spooled files, IBM i reports, and more. But an electronic document management system can. It digitizes every document, adds indexing, and stores all documents in one central repository.
Are there any limits to what documents can be captured in the system?
There are no limits! Every document you have can be captured into a Fortra document management system. And everything means everything—from IBM i spooled files to PDFs to reports generated from your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system—is stored in one central repository.
You won’t have to go through multiple systems to get your information ever again.
How does indexing work?
Documents are indexed as they enter your system so that any relevant search (i.e., date, name) pulls up the right document. This can happen automatically via optical character recognition (OCR), barcoding, or application integration when a document is scanned—in which case the software automatically analyzes and pulls text from the document into the index fields.
Plus, you can run monitors on folders and location to automatically input and index the information into your system.
Is it possible to automate document and data capture? And just how automated can we get?
Your capture processes can be automated to meet your company’s needs. Automating document capture might simply mean incorporating indexing. You can set up rules to automatically save information—for instance, all information sent to a certain email address.
Capture automation could also go to a higher level to match the volume of your company’s documents. For instance, if you have a very high volume of documents, you’d want to go to the top tier: intelligent capture. Intelligent capture (aka advanced capture) is completely hands-off—the system does the work for you.
What about signatures? Can we capture them electronically too?
Of course! A huge benefit of a document management system is that your documents won’t need to be created in paper form at all.
Instead, your documents can stay electronic and a signature can be captured in either “wet” (actual signature on a device) or pin-based form—without even leaving your document management system.
I already know how to find my documents. How will document management help me?
You may know how to find your documents, but that doesn’t mean anyone else will. With Fortra, document management can be truly standardized across your company. When documents are captured and indexed consistently, it makes it easy for anyone to find any document—now and in the future.
Wait: anyone can find documents? What about documents that need to be kept secure?
Anyone who is authorized can find documents. Documents can be secured by user authority, which means they can be made accessible to only a select few. Simply use a GUI web-based administrator to set up permissions for folders, users, and groups.
How easy is it actually to keep track of documents in a document management system?
Incredibly easy! By standardizing document capture, managing documents is simplified. You won’t need to worry about losing or misplacing a document. Documents are automatically indexed, so any relevant search immediately pulls up the document you need.
Version control prevents a document from being modified or overwritten without permission. If permission is granted to a user, the system will automatically log changes, making it clear what changed and when.
And built-in workflow tools make it easy to route documents and maintain visibility over where they are in a process. If there’s a bottleneck, you’ll know about it.
Digital document delivery is a no-brainer. We’re already sending documents by email. Why use an electronic document management system?
To speed up your processes! An electronic document management system can automate delivery processes for things like month-end or quarterly reports. Instead of manually sending a report in each instance, you can set up rules that will automatically deliver said report to the necessary recipients every time—without any prompting from you.
Plus, when you deliver a report through the document management system, it automatically captures a copy for archive purposes.
Why should we choose a Fortra document management solution?
A Fortra document management solution offers a complete document management system that easily integrates into your existing technology.
The document management system bridges the gap between every piece of software and every application that plays a role in your document processes. So, you can access and interact with every document from one central repository.
Plus, the Fortra expertise lies in understanding your company’s processes and how to implement document management to make them run smoothly.
How do we get started?
Getting started is easy: all you have to do is request your demo. We’ll discuss your processes—what they are and where they are slowing you down. From there, we’ll determine how to best implement document management to speed up those processes, reduce paper, and boost employee productivity.
Start Going Paperless Today
With Fortra Document Scanning software, going paperless is easy. Request your demo to see the software in action for yourself and learn how to digitize your documents—and make them easy to manage.