It’s Halloween! What are you afraid of? Global warming? Your mom? Getting toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe? What about losing crucial company documents? Even on Halloween, there’s not much scarier than not being able to find something important when you need it.
Information is worthless if you can’t get to it. Even if you deal mainly with electronic documents, if they’re not well organized, they’ll still present navigational issues. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, employees spend up to 50% of their days looking for information, but only 5-15% reading it. Sometimes this is due to a filing system that only one or a few people know how to navigate, creating a bottleneck in business processes, or too many content repositories and information silos that keep needed information inaccessible to other staff members.
Regardless of the cause, the inability to find things when you need it can pose serious problems, especially if your position requires quick decision making or customer service, and all that staff time spent adds up to a lot of wasted money as well. Inefficient business processes aren’t just slow – they’re expensive, too. Even after converting paper documents to electronic form, there’s still many more improvements that can be made. In order to reap the full benefits of digitizing your documents, you’ll need an efficient and effective way to store and manage them.
Content management solutions are often a great way to go about making your information easily retrievable so employees can turn all the time spent on searching into something productive. Once documents are scanned into your system, they’ll be captured by your solution and automatically indexed. Employees will be able to search for what they need by keyword and stay organized without allocating a ton of time to sorting things.
If your organization already has too many content management solutions, than enterprise content management (ECM) may be a great way to break down those silos and open up communication and collaboration between departments. ECM is also very scalable and capable of much more than just managing information, so if, in the future, you want to even further improve business processes, you can do it with the same solution.
Locating information you need shouldn’t take up a substantial portion of your day, distract you from other projects you’re working on, or create bottlenecks in otherwise smooth-running processes. If you’re content organization is creating unnecessary difficulties, it might be time to look into another way to store it. For more information on how a business process solution can solve your organization’s business process problems, download our “Ultimate Guide to ECM” below!
