organize business documents

8/3/2019 Organize Business Documents

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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



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



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



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



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