The days of manhandling essential data as paper documents have gone, every data, whether it is confidential or not getting handled by the document management system (DMS).
The DMS plays a crucial role in managing all the documents; not that it stores all your documents but also provides security and makes it easier to retrieve any records easily; the DMS also enables quick file sharing and simple collaboration—this is never possible if the work process depends on the paper documents.
So, in other words, it can be said that the document management system is making time for more productive work rather than wasting time searching for a file or delivering a file.
However, the purpose of the DMS is not only securing files for quick retrieval but also it tackles data for making some business decisions which eventually helps in business growth.
This article is all about how you can extract the hidden value of documents and data using the “Business Intelligence (BI)” from your DMS to grow your business.
Before beginning with the ways to get better business intelligence one must know about some basic things about BI and how DMS can be effective to extract BI from it.
What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence consists of the strategies and technologies that a company uses to analyze data about their business; which can provide the previous, current as well as predictive views of any business. Getting the views makes it easier for the employees, managers to take any decision related to the business.
How can the DMS of your organization be capable of working with BI?
The DMS has central storage for securely storing all your data or documents. So, without much effort, if you can combine a BI analytical tool with the DMS, then you can have the hidden value of the data of your company.
The analyzed results enable you to understand what your customers or clients want; how you can improve some serious processes like tracking activity, internal process, and of course, keeping up with industry trends.
Now getting into more details on how you can implement a business intelligence tool to extract hidden information from your DMS.
- Be Aware of Your Documents Location: You need to know what type of business data you are having and where your data is located. If you have a large organization with many departments, then possibly your business information can be located in different places. The data can be retrieved from any desktop, the cloud, server, social media, and website and physical storages like cabinets and drawers. So, first of all, you need to perform an audit process to get a hold of all your files and documents. The audit is also going to help in knowing the inefficiency in your work process, which you can improve at the same time as well as you get to know how your documents are being managed.
- Understanding The Business Objective: After getting a hold of all your documents, you need to know how the data can be useful to support your business objectives like,
- What type of data can be useful for employees to achieve their goals?
- Which analytical tools can be used to retrieve the data?
- Which device can the employees use to access information?
- How can the data be retrieved faster?
- How can the analyzed data be presented?
This article on Forbes will help you to understand your aim about your business.
- Digitizing the Documents: Needless to mention that working with paper documents creates such a mess which is never a disadvantage while working with the digital version of documents. The DMS is able to capture e-mails, and any other system generated results, so to extract the hidden business intelligence data, the DMS is a suitable option. It can generate, capture, and store the extracted data without any error. The auditing process is going to be a great help in case of digitizing the information because with the help of the process it can be determined which document or information needs to be digitized for getting the desired result. The digitization can be a daunting task; some smart scanning software is available, neat software is one of them, but to have complete control over your digital documents try neat software alternative.
- Making Sure that the Information is Secured: The auditing process is going to determine if your documents are secured or not; mainly the paper documents need much security as they can easily be copied, damaged or stolen. Step 3 can be beneficial in case of paper documents because digitizing them and storing it in the system can be less risky. DMS allows to secure files using password and also provides some another level security measures for protecting it from the hackers.
- Implement BI Tool with DCM: The DMS needs to integrate with the entire system in such a way that it theoretically “talks to” other software and applications; most importantly it needs to incorporate with BI tool for accurate results. If the DMS doesn’t get along well with the BI tool, then there is going to be problems in organizing, extracting, and getting the desired result.
A fully integrated document management system is capable of providing better insights with the help of BI for achieving a solid return on investment (ROI). - Educate and Train Your Employees: You need to educate yourself first with the concept of extracting and analyzing the information then you can understand how many training sessions your employees would need to understand the function and purpose of business intelligence analysis thoroughly and organize that much training sessions and train your employees.
This step is very much needed as because without having thorough knowledge about the process, the employees cannot get the idea about what to do with the data or how to use the analyzed results to implement in the work process for better workflow. If you want to know about how to train perfectly your employee then you should read this article on The Entrepreneur.
The excellent combination of BI and DMS can take out such results which you can use to improve your company’s work process and also can increase work efficiency in your employees. It’s a high time embrace such digital changes in your organization to keep up with the pace of other companies.
