What do most office employees do with their day? They create documents. A huge amount of them. 500 billion each year according to Microsoft Office.

What do most office employees do with their day? They create documents — a staggering amount of them. 500 billion each year according to Microsoft Office.

Now take those 500 billion documents and view them alongside these enterprise document management strategy stats:

• Employees spend 8.8 hours per week searching and gathering information, rather than creating it.
• According to an International Data Center study, knowledge workers spend 30% of the workday searching for information.
• UK employees spend over one million hours a week searching for misplaced documents at a cost of £20 million a year to their businesses.
• It takes up to 8 searches for workers to find the right document.
• 83% of knowledge workers lose time on document collaboration issues.

Despite the evolution of technology, many companies still clearly struggle to provide an adequate document management strategy for their workforce of avid content producers.

If you’re in the process of creating or updating your document management strategy, a quick overview of its history reveals some great tips and tools for an enterprise document management strategy roadmap that will work for your company.

Digital transformation: How document management strategy has evolved

Before the digital revolution, offices relied on physical paper documents to get business done. The inherent problems ranged from indexing documents to slow collaboration processes, from delivery delays to coffee spills. Paper documents were fragile and time-consuming to manage.

That’s why organizations such as AIIM championed the ‘paperless office’ with research suggesting that removing paper documents could improve staff productivity. However, simply going digital isn’t a complete document management strategy in itself. As with any new content management system, it comes with its own set of challenges.

Version control is an all-too-familiar example of a challenge that arose. For example: An employee works on a document and saves it to their desktop. Next, it gets attached to an email and sent back and forth to colleagues for review. Edits are inserted but keeping track of the latest document version is getting tricky. Did everyone remember to turn on Track Changes? Is it the latest version that’s being edited now? Meanwhile, employees are switching between email programs and MS Word, wasting time while the document is wide open to errors.

Companies also face many other challenges in creating document management best practices. That includes but isn’t limited to the following: 

• Understanding the lifecycle of a digital document (i.e. retention, archiving, deletion, etc.)
• Managing document types with different formats
• Best way to handle document storage (i.e., onsite vs. cloud storage) 
• Document security and permissions

Streamlining the digital document process to fit an organization’s needs as necessary. 

Document management software

Fast forward to today and businesses should have what they need to manage all types of documents effectively via Document Management Software.

Document management software (DMS) is used to track, manage and store both documents and visual assets. Paper documents are digitized, reducing storage needs and enabling fast file location with advanced search engines.

Unlike traditional DMS practices, with current Cloud-based Document Management Systems such as NetDocuments, iManage and SharePoint, document management strategy today is designed to keep employees up to speed with the latest version of a document while facilitating real-time and remote collaboration between multiple users via cloud storage.

Modern electronic document management systems are also sped up with handy features such as e-signatures, which research has proven saves companies $20 per document and increases turnaround time by up to 80%.

The hangover of traditional document management strategy

With such a tech-led evolution in document management strategy, where are companies going so wrong?

Firstly, despite the available software, many businesses are acting like their paper-centric predecessors. Only 17% of people work in what could be described as a paper-free office and 20% report that their consumption of paper is actually increasing. In these cases, all the original problems experienced by offices almost two decades ago have still not gone away.

Another major problem with document management strategy is relying on manual processes such as collaborating via email. This practice is incredibly common, but it’s not necessarily considered good document management. In a study carried out by Harris Interactive, it was reported that 92% of those surveyed relied on email to edit and share a new document, with 83% of Knowledge Workers wasting time each day editing the wrong version of a document.

If enterprises wish to increase productivity, collaboration, and compliance, human error needs to be minimized by investing in readily available and easy-to-use document management solutions.

What are the important elements to consider when choosing software for your document management strategy?

How well does your document management system fit in your enterprise content management ecosystem?

As with any tech that has an enterprise-wide effect, you need to carefully consider how the tools involved in document management implementation strategy affect the other software that makes up your enterprise content management (ECM) network. These include the systems relating to Digital Asset Management, Web Content Management, Document Governance, Business Process Management, and Records Management.

Templafy’s template and digital asset management system is designed to seamlessly integrate with other parts of enterprise content management systems that companies are already using. This means employees can easily find and access document templates as well as brand assets like logos, images, and videos from within office software, without switching between applications.

The use of templates

Consider integrating intelligent document templates to supercharge your document management strategy. Hosted via the cloud, dynamic templates such as those utilized by Templafy, allow employees to access and edit on-brand document templates pre-populated with the latest employee and company information. They give workers all the tools they need to create documents that follow the latest company and brand guidelines while saving time in the document creation phase.

Alongside the versioning benefits that DMS bring, features like Templafy’s BrandChecker optimize brand compliance by identifying any off-brand elements and offering pre-approved alternatives at the click of a button — again saving companies time monitoring the output of employees.