11 Best Practices for Document Management

By Joan Honig, DocuWare: When you’re thinking about how to implement digital document management for your company — or how to enhance your existing system — focusing on the fundamentals and defining your goals helps ensure success. Get a head start by putting these best practices for document management in place right away.

How to apply best practices at your company

1. Start with goals and develop key metrics

Many companies don’t take time to set goals and determine how to measure their progress. If you don’t know the reason for your document management system implementation, it’s hard to know if you’ve had success with it.

Being specific is important. Are you trying to help users find documents more quickly? Save on document storage costs? Improve collaboration? Re-engineer manual processes?

Before you implement a document management solution, determine the metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) required to measure progress toward goals. Then, set a baseline you can benchmark against your existing system.

For example, you may discover it takes 10 minutes to process an invoice with your current system and find out it only takes two minutes after using digital document management for a month. Sharing these measurable successes with your colleagues is a powerful way to show the value of the project and encourage user adoption as you move forward.