Most likely every business school in the country teaches a section on lease versus buy analysis. That may be trickier now with the constant tax law changes, but nonetheless, it is a systematic approach to comparing the cost variables and economic benefits of each option. The end result of the analysis will hopefully provide a clear choice that shows one option with a superior return on investment.
Believe it or not, this type of analysis is helpful in the document management world as well. It’s called the repair or replace quandary. We find that a high percentage of companies that completed a scanning project, or inherited the end product of one, found that the work was poor quality. This makes it difficult and frustrating for users to find important information. Does it make…
Has efficiency peaked with mobility?
It seems simple to envision the tools required by a mobile worker. The basics quickly jump to mind including a phone, a laptop, chargers of course and a Starbucks or Panera card. Then you need a location, which could include a home office, an office suites membership or the aforementioned coffee shop.
The real tools of the trade are more software oriented. It’s critical to have a fully cloud based infrastructure or a VPN that provides access to your CRM, accounting system/ERP, messaging app, email and of course documents. The emergence of technology and the disappearance of ledger books, the Rolodex and filing cabinets resulted in amazing efficiency gains. Now that these tools are also available to mobile users, has efficiency peaked?
Even with all of the great new tools at our disposal, incorrect… We are all different
It’s no surprise that no two businesses are exactly alike and certainly no two employees are either. Our differences, along with the options provided by technology and changing circumstances, create a tremendous number of possible outcomes as it relates to information creation. This is especially true of information in the form of documents.
Every day in every business, employees are creating documents, searching for documents, receiving new documents and sharing documents with others. It’s imperative that the information makes sense, otherwise errors are made and time is wasted. But since we are all different, don’t be surprised at how someone else defines what a document is and in what form it’s delivered.
Document management systems (“DMS”) have to be about more than just finding documents, they have to be tools to help organize and… Keeping it simple is not always the answer
Recently we helped a client convert a small amount of paper documents related to a one time transaction into PDFs. The PDFs would simply be in a folder and viewed or emailed as needed. To keep it simple the files could be named in a structured format, ie. “ABCCo-Contract-060116-Brazil-Engine-D-JF.pdf”. Most of that short hand is clear except the “D” is for diesel engines and that the Sales Rep was John Franklin? Seemed simple enough and so we proceeded based on the clients requirements.
In this case, the volume of documents was small, but the documents had a significant amount of descriptive information that could be captured. Each piece of information could be captured in a document management system database and ready for user searches. For example, find all contracts for Brazil or all…
Poor Man’s Business Intelligence
During a recent lunch conversation a comment was made about the great benefits of business intelligence (“BI”) – a tool used to connect lots of information dots to generate useful data. However, that was quickly followed by a second comment about the often failed attainment of those benefits. The culprit seems to be bad or incomplete historical data, ie data stuck in documents or inconsistently entered data.
Another discussion at this lunch centered on co-tenancy, a complicated topic that impacts the commercial real estate industry. As an example, a co-tenancy clause could allow one tenant to reduce its rent if another, typically significant, tenant exits the property. The significant tenant is a draw to the property that benefits other tenants. So how do these two topics…
A Life Lesson – Sharing is Good
What are the needs of your employees to share documents with people outside of your company? They might share documents with customers, business partners, vendors, lawyers, bankers, government agencies and many other outside parties.
Your users want this to be easy – write an email, attach a document or two and hit send. Your executives want to make sure that the process is efficient, but also meets security and confidentiality requirements. The CIO doesn’t want the network to crash or the email system to bog down.
Companies that are using a shared network drive for document management can expect basic sharing to be easy for users (provided they can find the files they are looking for). Users will attach the files to an email, copy the files to a thumb drive or push the… 