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Accurate knowledge of records status with electronic records management
How many man-hours are absolutely necessary for business processes and how many can an organisation afford? Answer: as few as possible! But the reality is somewhat different. In many places, business processes still ignore the principle of value creation, despite the intense competition and downward pressure on costs faced by businesses and administrative bodies. The main cause of this is the unfounded adherence to paper as a carrier of information and the lack of continuity of digital business processes. The result is a lack of productivity – at the cost of service quality, transparency, flexibility and speed.
We have mastered information technologies for collecting, duplicating and processing information. But businesses and administrative bodies lack suitable processes for making the content of this information accessible quickly at an acceptable level of effort and cost. Normal practice continues to be to collect, process and forward commercial and technical information and documents from and about customers, suppliers, staff, patients, clients and citizens in paper records.
With sequential process steps in particular, paper is a key cost factor and a brake on productivity. Less than half of all information is currently available in electronic form. The rest is stored as paper in job files or folders. This serious modal fragmentation is extremely detrimental to the organisation of work and workflow processing. Efficiency, speed and transparency suffer and prevent cost-focused and customer-oriented action.
Digital records can be handled in the same way as paper records, but offer many more functions, much greater cost-effectiveness and security. Above all, they fulfil the important purpose of making it much easier to access records in organisations in which this would otherwise be complicated by geographical spread. The electronic records management module of the DOXiS iECM Suite can manage both commercial and technical documents, drawings, charts and multimedia objects and display them via an integrated viewer.
In terms of data protection and security in particular, electronic records are unsurpassed. With electronic records it is possible to define precisely who is allowed to see which records, workflows and documents and who is not. Wherever records contain sensitive data and information, e.g. in the areas of HR, contracts and healthcare, there is no better alternative than the digital record.
Digital records management puts productivity back into business processes. Organisations should not just look for what is new, but for what is recognisably better for workflow processing. The answers to questions such as the following play a key role:
- Will I create and process records and documents largely automatically?
- Will I receive up-to-date, comprehensive data and documents quickly?
- Will my workflow management be more cost-effective, more transparent and faster?
- Will I secure retention of and (multi-site) access to sensitive and business-critical data?