Evaluating EDMS: How Manual is Your Document Management System?

Organizations continue to invest in an EDMS, or Electronic Document Management System, due to the mass amounts of information produced. Even in today’s digital era, a significant amount of corporate information is still distributed via paper and email attachments. The typical office worker in the United States may use more than 10,000 sheets of paper per year and spends well more than 2 hours a day sending and reading emails, and exchanging files. These examples draw a correlation to the direct costs associated with doing business. However, this example fails to highlight the indirect and often hidden costs associated with manual and paper-based processes.

Accounts payable (AP) invoice management is a standard business process that is often handled via paper and email. The tasks involved in a standard AP invoice process include: receiving an invoice, opening letters, use of document scanning software, internal mail distribution, follow-up communications, manual account entries, approvals, further distributions, book keeping, physical filing of documents, and—finally payment. Ultimately, we are left with a long trail of manual steps that take weeks to fully complete.

Standard AP invoice processes involve a number of unnecessary manual tasks, making your business vulnerable to data entry errors, lost documents, misfiling, time misspent for document retrieval, and additional physical storage needs. Manual document management systems are also restricted to onsite working schedules and location limitations, causing further delays in registering the AP invoice in your ERP system. This shortcoming directly restricts your company’s ability take advantage of opportunities to strengthen cash liquidity, such as prompt payment promotions and discounts.

In addition, physical documents and unstructured communications, such as emails, are difficult to track, manage, and retrieve. These type of document mediums result in reduced invoice visibility and prevents overall monitoring of the invoice management process. Manual procedures with ineffective monitoring greatly reduce a company’s ability to prevent policy breaches and fraud and make it difficult to implement an environment of governance and compliance. Many businesses are considering EDMS, document scanning software, or document management systems to solve these pains.

NTT DATA Business Solutions helps our customers realize efficiencies and automate their AP processes by focusing on:

• Elimination of manual, error-prone activities
• Removal of all paper and physical storage costs
• Providing document visibility and retrieval mechanisms

In this three-part blog series, we take a deep dive into it.smartSCAN, our “out of the box” solution for EDMS and document management software needs.  We also introduce it.approval, our solution for managing, controlling, approving and posting of business documents within SAP.

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