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Every aspect of your business depends on
documents. Whether you’re in Legal, Sales,
Marketing, Finance, or IT, you deal with
dozens of documents per week. These
budgets, contracts, invoices, proposals,
and other documents, support the business
processes at the heart of your organization.
But with tens of thousands of documents
in your company, and many more created,
scanned, and added each week, how do
you nd what you need? How do you know
you have the latest version? How can you
locate the most relevant piece of content?
This paper looks at best practices for
organizing your documents to help boost
productivity across your teams.
With so many documents in your organization it is
important to support efcient document retrieval. To
do so, you should begin by understanding how team
members interact with their documents. This helps
you organize documents from the beginning of your document management initiative and support best
practices going forward. To manage documents, start
by asking questions like:
• Are there relatively static groupings of documents?
You may divide documents by organizational units,
like “HR” or “Finance”. By establishing a folder
structure for these groupings you give users an
easily understood way to structure documents.
Think carefully about how teams think about
document groupings.
• How are documents used in the organization? Are
documents applicable to a certain customer or
geography? Do some teams need access to the
document? Is there a particular project that the
document relates to? Does the document expire
on a given date? Metadata is a powerful and
convenient way to organize documents. Look at
grouping documents based on attributes that make
sense to your organization.
• What are the repeatable processes in your
organization? Are there elements that can be
standardized? Many organizations have activities
that can be converted into templates. For instance,
when new customers are signed-up, is there a
standard set of information that must be collected?
If so, you should determine what templates it makes
sense to build to simplify how documents are
created and organized.
BUSINESS
ORGANIZE
DOCUMENTS
H O W T OASSESS HOW YOUR TEAM ACCESSES ITS DOCUMENTS
FIRST STEPS:
ORGANIZE DOCUMENTS TO BOOST PRODUCTIVITY
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Folders are among the most intuitive ways
to organize content. Users are accustomed
to structuring their documents based on a
hierarchical format. When beginning the process
you should investigate the most logical way to
group documents. Is it by department, geography,or document type? Many organizations select
business units as a way to begin, but this will
depend on your own organizational priorities.
An element to investigate when implementing
folders is to determine whether business
processes can be tied to folders. For instance, a
nance organization may place all unapproved
invoices in one folder and then move invoices as
they are approved into a ‘nalized’ folder. Or, alegal team may create a folder for unapproved
sales contracts. A contract approval workow can
then be associated with the folder so that all new
documents added to the folder must go through a
dened lifecycle.
The document management solutions that you
investigate should support the linkage of business
process activities with folders and other ways that
you organize documents.
Folders also provide a convenient way to managewhich individuals have access to a given set of
documents. For instance, the legal team may have
access to all contracts, while the sales team is only
granted access to contracts associated with active
clients. The document management tool that you
select should allow permissions to be applied at a
folder level.
Templates give you another way to keep control
over your documents. Let’s say that you havea highly repeated process, like “New Customer
On-Boarding”. There are likely standard pieces
of content that are created each time a new
customer arrives. For instance, you may have
customer contracts, statements of work, licensing
terms, presentations, and proposals. Your
document management tool should allow you to
create folder template structures so that they can
be standardized and reused each time a new
customer comes on board.
DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT
ORGANIZINGCONTENT
SIMPLE
T O
M A K E
USING FOLDERS TO ORGANIZE DOCUMENTS
MANAGE ACCESS AND REPEAT PROCESSES
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Documents often t into multiple categories. A
legal contract might relate to a particular client, a
certain product, and multiple geographic regions.
As a result, it is important to make the document
easy to retrieve even when it doesn’t t neatlyinto just one folder.
Metadata provides a way to address this need.
Metadata are elements that describe a document
based on useful concepts. So, you can mark
a document as being applicable to a certain
geography, customer, and product. These
‘tags’ allow you to group documents across
multiple categories. While metadata can be
easily customized going forward, it is helpful to
understand how your team will tag its documents
and dene those groupings early.
When investigating a document management
technology, it is important to look to tools that
go beyond simple text-based tags. You should be
able to build and tailor metadata based on
picklists, lists, date elds, rich texts – whatever
best describes your documents and makes them
easy to store and retrieve.
You should also investigate what metadata to
make mandatory. If there are attributes of a
document that must be managed, then you
should standardize the metadata collected. For
instance, ‘review date’ for a contract may be
imperative for your legal team to have in place.
At the same time, it should be easy to addmetadata. That means that whether you access a
document through a browser, mobile device, or a
desktop tool, users must be able to easily add
and update metadata. And when uploading large
volumes of documents, for instance from a
scanner or in another bulk operation, it should be
easy to add descriptors to your documents.
ORGANIZEMETADATA
D O C U M E N T S
U S I N G
T O
USE METADATA, TAGS TO FILTER DATA
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DOCUMENTSEASE
RETRIEVING
W I T H
Storing documents is only half of the equation. It
must also be easy for users to nd and retrievethe documents that they need. Hundreds of hours
are lost annually by employees struggling to nd
a needed document. These delays can be very
disruptive to your document led business processes.
Your document searching mechanism should
be able to leverage the work you’ve done with
metadata. That means locating all customer
contracts for EMEA with a due date of this year, for
example. Because searches are often conductedrepeatedly, you should be able to save your
congured searches. That allows colleagues to
efciently nd the same documents and collaborate
more effectively. Plus, your search should recognize
text that is “hidden” within images or scanned
documents by using OCR.
Searching is a great way to locate a document
that you know that you need. But how do you nd
documents that you don’t know that you need? Here
analytics can help. Your document management toolshould surface the most viewed, commented on,
and ‘liked’ documents. That allows users to identify
content that their colleagues nd valuable – like
a new piece of marketing collateral or a nancial
template for creating budgets.
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SEARCH SMARTER TO UNCOVER
USEFUL COLLATERAL
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WHAT’S NEXT?
SMART FOLDERS
FOLDER TEMPLATES
ANALYTICS SMART FEEDS
GAMIFICATION
PERMISSIONS
CUSTOMIZABLE
METADATA
REQUIRED F IELDS
SMART SEARCH
SMART TAGS
Organizing documents must be simple to manage,
but powerful enough to support your business
processes. Look to solutions that are customizable
to your own unique business processes and let you
structure your documents with ease.
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DOCUMENT Y O U N E E D
THIS IS THE