Digital Records and Content Access – The Easy Way!

As our current pandemic continues to drive the necessity for remote work and collaboration, managing content has become more important than ever. Businesses and government agencies have discovered how ill-prepared they were to pivot overnight into a remote work environment, especially when it came to their documents and processes.

Across the globe, organizations with processes rooted in paper – or even those who routinely searched through physical files for records requests – were suddenly faced with the challenge of needing to be in the office because that’s where the paper files lived. Organizations who had already begun their digital transformation journey found themselves able to keep their heads above water.

While there are many steps and stages to digital transformation, those organizations that recognized, ahead of the pandemic, the need to take a different look at how their organization handled data and documents, found themselves leveraging that technology in remote environments to ensure business continuity.

And for areas of the country that were struck with both COVID 19 and hurricanes, business continuity was critical since their physical office was gone.

Some losses to their businesses included:

DIGITIZING RECORDS – BACKFILE and GO FORWARD

Companies who are moving their operations are typically faced with the daunting task of moving their physical records to the new location if they have not been digitized. And moving is a great time to look at getting rid of those heavy files and filing cabinets that take up so much space. Often, businesses have no idea what’s in their boxes or filing cabinets.

So how do you tackle physical records without becoming overwhelmed?

• Understand what’s in those boxes
• Determine what can be shredded
• Categorize what needs to be digitized
• Collaborate on the best strategy for accessing the records

Through the assessment process, businesses can understand the extent of their needs for content management services.

USING CONTENT MANAGEMENT PLATFORMS FOR DATA ACCESS

Content management discussions should typically start at the most paper-heavy departments like accounts payable, contracts, and human resources.

In looking at the accounts payable department, businesses can start with capturing, classifying and extracting data from invoices. Once completed, they can streamline and automate the workflow process to ensure those invoices get processed. Many times this ends with integrating the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, which can start any business on the road to better data access and a more productive work ecosystem. It’s a great early step to the digital transformation journey.

Other departments value the elimination of the paper trail from the beginning. This is particularly true in government, where many agencies rely on a request to start a process – often with a form.  These processes are critical to providing services to constituents or to assist with inter-agency collaboration.  Capturing this information and data in electronic form allows for more efficient routing, evaluations and decision making – providing for a streamlined, digital government.

Another key element businesses and government agencies are faced with considering more than ever is the cloud.  While cloud-based solutions have been a hot topic for several years, many organizations were not ready to make the necessary commitment. Before the pandemic, we started to see the tide turn. Now that we are many months into this pandemic, a cloud strategy makes more sense than it ever has before. When records and data are stored in a cloud-based platform, everyone can access what they need for their job when they need it from a secure environment.

From small to medium-sized businesses (SMB) to enterprise-sized businesses and across state and local governments, content management solves challenges organizations are facing regardless of their size.

Every business can ask themselves the same questions:

• Where are the challenges to my business continuity plan in this pandemic?
• How can I give my employees better access to the documents and data they need?
• How can I better adapt to evolving business needs and customer demands?
• Are my constituents looking for increased speed to processes while improving transparency?
• Where can I improve my efficiency through business process automation?
• Is now the time to embrace the cloud for data storage and security?

If your business is looking to digitize files or to create electronic forms, but unsure of the most effective way, we can help.  Depending on each business – the level of digitization varies, so why pay for a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution that may not be right for you? Konica Minolta is here to help as we all rethink our go-forward business strategy and ecosystem.