Scattered information across various locations, applications, and tools is an ever increasing problem for organizations of every size and industry. Workers now spend hours searching through databases and repositories, without any confidence they have found all relevant content. Studies show Americans spend an average of two hours per day just searching for documents.
This greatly reduces business efficiency, stifles collaboration, and risks companies making the wrong decisions.
Enterprise document management (EDM) solutions improve productivity, compliance, and decision-making practices. Here’s your complete guide to enterprise document management.
Defining Enterprise Document Management (EDM)
Enterprise document management (EDM) software empowers businesses to digitally organize, categorize, index, process, and monitor access and usage to both structured and unstructured data. In a world where document related challenges result in an average productivity loss of 21.3%, EDM solutions are becoming increasingly essential.
New EDM solutions and digitization services can enable companies to reduce the costs and complexity associated with traditional file storage. Features in an advanced enterprise document management system help to streamline document retrieval, automate document-regulated tasks, and minimize risks. EDM systems connect all forms of business documents in a centralized digital repository, enhancing ease of access and security.
Most importantly, they can manage both structured and unstructured data. Structured data, such as information stored in organized databases, can be easy enough to categorize and retrieve. However, many businesses also deal with large amounts of unstructured data—emails, PDFs, images, and more—all of which are tougher to organize and search.
EDM systems seamlessly search and present information regardless of where it is stored. This ensures businesses can streamline access to all forms of critical information, helping organizations to unlock the full power of their data.
The Importance of EDM in Modern Organizations
Today’s organizations in virtually every industry create, store, and manage vast amounts of content in digital and physical formats. Keeping track of all paper documents, electronic documents, and workflows manually is notoriously complex.
EDM Architecture Features
EDM functionality spans a wide range of major functions. Below is a notional architecture of the major features.
Increased operational efficiency:
EDM solutions automate document workflows, related to approvals, filing and more, reducing the need for manual document handling. They can accelerate various processes, ensuring relevant data is accessible to the right individuals and departments automatically.
With advanced search features, EDM technologies can also reduce the frustrations associated with finding documents in record databases. Using fuzzy search, for instance, users can still surface relevant information when the keywords they search for are incorrect, or misspelled.
This accessibility helps to break down silos within organizations, and accelerate decision-making processes. Business leaders and decision-makers will have the most current, accurate, and valuable data for every situation.
Improved Security and Compliance
EDM provides data management functionality that supports transfer of electronic data to regulators, retention schedules and disposition of files. Below are records management functions typical:
● Management of Retention Schedules
● Document Search and Retrieval with four search modes for both metadata and full text
● Creation of a records management workflows using the built in java business process management (jBPM) workflow interface.
● A range of tailored reports based on agency requirements
● Auditing of RM stages
● Unique rules for permanent vs. temporary records
● Full administrative access to the BPM interface for creation of new or modifying existing file plans, schedules and processes in an intuitive interface
Enhanced Collaboration
In many larger organizations, workforces and teams are distributed across a range of environments, software solutions, and tools. This can make document control and content management even more complex, particularly when dispersed teams need to access the same data.
In large organizations and environments with distributed workforces, EDM systems can boost collaboration and innovation. They make documents easily accessible to authorized personnel across all departments and remote locations.
An advanced EDM solution properly implement can easily search for, access, and share valuable records, without having to spend hours searching for the right content. This means everyone in a team can work together easily with the same information, regardless of their location.
Cost Savings
A robust enterprise document management system provides companies with a solution for managing both digital documents and scanned versions of physical records. This significantly reduces the need for and expenses associated with investing in physical document storage space.
By investing in an end-to-end electronic document management solution, an organization can reduce waste, and lower their carbon footprints. Keep in mind, today, American businesses alone consume over 21 million kinds of paper each year. They can reduce the cost of paying for storage space, paper, and filing cabinets.
Plus, companies using an electronic document management process reduce the threats associated with physical document management. Digital documents aren’t exposed to the same risks caused by unforeseen circumstances such as fire or floods, which could damage physical files.
Scalability
Unlike traditional document and content management systems, EDM solutions are also inherently scalable. They can adapt to accommodate various types of documents and unstructured data, endless users, and multiple different processes.
For larger organizations and government agencies, EDM systems can scale and adapt to handle high volumes of documents in an instant. They can make it easier to ensure global compliance with regulations, helping businesses to streamline operations, protect data and maintain accurate records at scale. They can even support ongoing digital transformation efforts.
For growing business, EDM systems make it easy to improve efficiency and collaboration rapidly, while reducing costs and minimizing risks.
Key Features in EDM Solutions
When you consider an EDM solution for your organization, it’s important to understand what features are a bare minimum you should require, and what features you may find more or less impactful to your organization. Below are core and advanced features.
Core EDM Features:
- Federated Indexing across internal and external data sources
- Continuous federated indexing: One Search Finds All
- Advanced search methods: Pattern (fuzzy logic), Concept (natural language), and Boolean, Geospatial (visual area of interest), and Exact
- Album creation: individually or publicly share unique information
- Alert notification service: automatic notification of newly ingested information of interest
- OCR: native, AWS, or Azure options
- Data Level Security: supports the “need-to-know” down to an individual digital object
- Federated indexing across multi-cloud and on-premise (data stays at original source) with optional ingesting
- User-friendly data management tools: robust global metadata editor, browsable data hierarchy, faceted search, search/results/display preferences
- Automated data discovery
- PII/PHI identification and redaction
- Global metadata editor
- Records Governance and Records Management Automation
- Ensure regulatory compliance (HIPAA, M-23-07, etc.)
- NARA compliant: RM supports NARA compliant PDF A file format for electronic record submission to NARA
- Audit trail and alerts based on file activity and user’s credentials
- Advanced search methods: pattern (fuzzy logic), concept (natural language), boolean (standard search), and geospatial (non-spatial files from map interface)
Advanced EDM Features
- Data Level Security: supports the “need-to-know” down to an individual digital object
- Integrated workflow engine for RPA
- Seamless API integrations with current systems technologies
- Video and audio speech to text transcription
- Hot folder: automatic ingestion and metadata tagging of data
- AI recognition of multi-lingual text/audio/video
- Text extraction, intelligent indexing service, and content platform for analytics
- AI-based data extraction
- Citation creation
- Geotag: draw area, drop a pin, predefine locations, or extract entity (place, names, or coordinates)
- Features image chipping, bounding box search, side by side viewer, and pan/zoom, mensuration (distance and area), and more
- Choice of alternative base maps such as street, satellite, and imagery street hybrid
- Cross lingual search: single language search finds results from many languages
- Geospatial entity and PII/PHI data extraction
Additional Features of Enterprise Document Management Systems
As EDM solutions evolve to do more automatically for organizations, there are now specific cross-function features being implemented by leading EDM solution providers, including:
- Document intelligence: Document intelligence uses artificial intelligence to automate tasks related to document classification, tagging, and data extraction. AI can recognize patterns within documents and complete tasks in an instant, boosting workplace efficiency.
- Dynamic redaction: With dynamic redaction, organizations can automatically hide or reveal sensitive data based on user permissions. Depending on a person’s access level, dynamic redaction can also conceal data from certain users, improving security and compliance.
Geospatial intelligence: Within EDM systems, geospatial intelligence helps with analyzing and interpreting location-based information alongside non-geospatial data. This ensures businesses can achieve a more holistic view of various connected data points.
How EDM Supports Digital Asset Management
Digital asset management (DAM) is a subset of enterprise document management, focused on managing electronic documents and files like images and videos. As businesses continue to rely on these assets for communication, branding, marketing, and more, DAM plays a crucial role in enterprise content management and organization.
Enterprise document management systems feature built-in DAM capabilities that improve the management of digital assets throughout their lifecycle, from document creation and storage to retrieval and distribution. Users can also tag and index documents and files within the system with metadata tagging. This means each document can be defined by factors like file type, date, author, and keywords, making it easier to search for relevant files in the future.
How EDM Enables Records Management
Just as EDM improves digital asset management, it also significantly enhances records management. Records management is the process of retaining, organizing, and securely storing company records in compliance with industry and legal regulations.
These records can include everything from employee files to financial documents and contracts. Effective records management is critical to ensuring regulatory compliance, and EDM streamlines the process. EDM systems can use automated workflows to track record lifecycles, ensuring companies adhere to document retention schedules and rules.
They can automatically prompt actions based on when records need to be reviewed, retained, or deleted. Plus, they help to maintain accuracy in recordkeeping by ensuring everything remains securely stored in a central digital repository. This makes it less likely that records will be lost, misfiled, or damaged in some way.
The Value of Document Sanitization and Redaction
We mentioned the value of dynamic redaction when dealing with document resources above. Document sanitization is a crucial process for many organizations—particularly those in highly regulated industries. During document sanitization, sensitive and confidential information is removed from documents based on security and compliance standards.
This process is crucial for protecting sensitive documents, like ones with personally identifiable information or financial records. Dynamic redaction simplifies the sanitization process, by automatically removing or hiding information based on preset rules. For instance, your enterprise document management system might automatically remove all financial data from a document before it’s shared.
In sectors like the legal, government, healthcare, and defense sectors, where data privacy and security are critical, EDM solutions can help businesses avoid severe financial, legal, and reputational damage.
Enabling EDM with Geospatial Intelligence
Geospatial intelligence can greatly enhance your organizations data intelligence with advanced EDM systems.Geospatial intelligence EDM systems enable users to overlay location-based data into traditional document management workflows. This allows organizations to combine geographic information with other types of documents, offering a more comprehensive view of data.
Many businesses and government agencies use geospatial intelligence for a range of tasks. They tap into location-based data to track assets, analyze geographic trends, plan logistics strategies, and more.
For instance, a logistics company could use geospatial data within an enterprise document management system to monitor the movement of shipments, and manage related contracts and delivery schedules.
Since EDM systems can handle both non-geospatial data, like contracts, emails, and reports, and geospatial insights like coordinates and maps, they provide a fuller picture for business decision-making. Companies can use geospatial intelligence within EDM to improve operational efficiency, enhance planning strategies, and achieve sustainable growth.
Fuzzy Search in Enterprise Document Management
Fuzzy search, enabled by advanced enterprise search solutions in enterprise document management systems, helps users find relevant documents with greater efficiency. Even when someone uses incorrect, incomplete, or misspelled search terms, they can still surface the right results.
Unlike search solutions that focus on exact keywords, fuzzy search uses algorithms to identify files and data based on approximate matches and variations. Fuzzy search tools can also retrieve information from all forms of data. This includes unstructured data formats such as emails, scanned documents, or images with embedded text.
For example, with optical character recognition (OCR) technology, companies can convert scanned text into searchable data. Fuzzy search systems then allow users to search through that data quickly and easily.
Fuzzy search further enhances accuracy by accounting for variations in spelling or incomplete keywords. This is particularly useful when handling large volumes of unstructured data where exact matches may not always be possible.
Not only does fuzzy search improve efficiency in document management and retrieval by reducing the time spent manually searching for documents, but it can reduce the risk of human error. By considering variations in search terms, this feature ensures critical documents aren’t overlooked due to minor input mistakes.
Unlock the Potential of Enterprise Document Management
For all companies, from scaling organizations in finance and healthcare to large global enterprises and government groups, enterprise document management systems are extremely powerful. These intuitive tools empower companies to streamline their content and document management processes, improve efficiency, and enhance collaboration at scale.
What’s more, enterprise document management technology helps businesses maintain compliance with evolving industry and legal standards. They provide the tools organizations need to restrict access to specific data, redact information from documents, and encrypt essential files.
Across industries, EDM systems can help companies accelerate their digital transformation journeys, reduce costs, and achieve more with their data.
Learn more about how cutting edge enterprise document management solutions can optimize your document workflows by contacting the PFTS team today.
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