How Spending Time Converting To Electronic Content Management Saves You Time

Particularly with the advent of more accessible and refined technology, there’s big business in helping businesses store their crucial documentation digitally on-site or in the cloud. Leading Electronic Content Management solutions tout a bevy of benefits to their services, but the biggest question for any business should be: Will the initial outlay of man-hours converting your business to predominately digital records be recouped in a reasonable timespan?

And correspondingly, how can an off-site document storage warehouse save you time competing with your current in-house solution just down the hall?

Effortless Organization

With a digitally managed database of your documents, access to both physical originals and digital copies of your records is made trivially easy. Digital copies are accessible at the click of a mouse with the proper access credentials, with full text search capability across documents, projects, and other organizational units you specify. If an audit or other atypical requirement necessitates physical access or retrieval, real-time location location systems and passive RFID collaborate to point you right to the file you want.

Compared to on-site solutions, digital or physical, you’ll still save time thanks to improved organization methods and access paradigms despite the geographical distance. And the best part? Both are always automatic once a new paper document is converted to its digital parsed and indexed form. There’s no need to purchase new servers or set up a complicated indexed database or ensure a record is properly returned to alphabetical order.

Intelligent Integration

Only you intimately know your business, but similarly, third party Electronic Content Management experts perform complex integrations with companies likely above and below your scale day in and day out. So long as all of your organization’s departments are actively involved in the process, full integration to electronic can be painless and create negligible to no downtime for critical document access. For the most crucial resources, most ECM providers will accommodate on-site scanning requests to allow those documents to remain accessible in case of emergency.

Catastrophe Evasion (or, the time you didn’t know you saved)

The effects of events that don’t actually occur are by nature impossible to measure, but given the increasingly competitive nature of today’s modern business environment, we’d be remiss to gloss over the very real advantage a professional Electronic Content Management partnership provides to your sensitive data security.

A good ECM specialist warehouses data securely, with 24/7 armed guard protection. The very nature of the optimized physical storage an ECM provides means each warehouse protects myriad clients’ data simultaneously with no human-readable identifying information. Furthermore, warehouses are completely climate-controlled for optimal preservation of both paper and digital backup media. Having data off-site, in the cloud, or otherwise dispersed securely provides you an additional layer of redundancy in any unexpected event - be it a flood or a forced entry.

Plus, with fully automated document retention policies in place, your ECM will securely destroy paper and digital media on-premises in a pinch or in warehouse, ensuring your business is continually minimizing its legal exposure.

While the time savings achieved by a new process are impossible to quantify by nature until that process is fully developed and integrated, it’s undeniable that little efficiency savings repeated and spread across an organization add up to big gains over time. The true testament? There are plenty of case studies of businesses switching to Electronic Content Management from traditional in-house paper record management showing its efficacy...but almost no businesses switch from digital to paper.