Buying Guide: Document Management

In the early 1990s the words “paperless” and “office” were stuck together. And they sounded good, like “space” and “travel”—but few people had any idea how to make either of them a reality. From customer feedback arriving in mailroom, to the boardroom presentation to address that feedback—anywhere in your company you find a physical piece of paper, there's an outsourcing company ready to help you.

Probably your first thoughts are that you don't need a paperless office, you're just fine with your current method of document archive and retrieval, and that adding an expensive document management partner can't help you cut costs.

While you might not be able to go paperless, you can certainly achieve less-paper, and partnering with a document management service doesn't have to cost you more money than it saves.

Document management covers a wide spectrum of services, though most of this article references archival, retrieval, version control, along with compliance and security products.

Contracting with a document management service to handle your printing needs, for example, may provide scalability in the number of printers you have on-site, without the up-front cost of having to purchase those printers—this is especially useful if your need for additional printing power is temporary.

Many small businesses use the simplest electronic document archiving solution available to them—that is, the native file hierarchy of whatever operating system their computer uses. While this is a very cost-effective method for most, it's rarely a way to actively reduce expenditure in the long-term. A white paper from InfoTrends, Inc., of Weymouth, Mass., published in November 2007, says that “managing content in OS-native file systems simply does not pass the compliance litmus test. The ad-hoc management of content within these systems does not map to security, privacy, or consistent records management best practices.” Or, to put it another way, the complexity of document security, or industry standards compliance, is only as strong as the system's users can understand—and most end-users are not information security specialists, and most operating systems are not designed with business-level document security in mind.

Whatever you need your document management service to do, it can help you reduce your costs. Even if it looks like it won't. Adding a small cost for a service vendor can reduce labor and materials costs in a number of other areas.

According to Bill Priemer, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Hyland Software Inc., of Rocky River, Ohio, your administrative staff spend 15-20 percent of their time “looking for a document, finding it, copying it, putting it back where they found it.”

That's everyone on your staff shuffling papers for six weeks of the year. On your dime.

Your office probably communicates with email, most of the time. You probably revise copies of documents and publications on your computer before you ever print them. These things have certainly helped move us towards a less-paper office.

The dream of a paperless office is that any document that has passed through your company is quickly  retrievable, infinitely re-producable with no loss of quality, and stored electronically for all eternity. The reality is that there will always be rogue pieces of paper, even if you think you're paperless. Whether it's the current invoice from a vendor, or a bill you're sending to a customer—very few work places can actually eliminate paper entirely.

So while there will be an additional expense in outsourcing your document management, there is also likely to be a cost reduction in other lines of your balance sheet. Ideally, the cost reduction will more than offset the additional expense. The trick, if there is one, is to identify the parts of your business that are best suited to provide that cost reduction.

There are a lot of document management services. There's Hyland Software Inc., Cardiff Software Inc., Documentum Inc.--and if those names aren't familiar to you, IBM, FedEx Office, and IKON Office Systems, Inc., also offer document management services and software.

These companies offer everything from simple needs assessments to full-scale systems for managing collaboration and archival services, to custom software designed to meet your business's needs—including security and standards compliance requirements. If you visit the websites of these companies, you'll find links to white papers and research documents.

As with any vendor relationship, not all providers offer the same products and services—and offerings that share the same name are not necessarily the same from company to company.

There are a number of things to consider when shopping around for a document management service. You should decide what part(s) of your business will use the service, whether that service should be on-site or off-site, and how well it will integrate into your current environment.

On-site services are offered at a customer's site—office, warehouse, factory, or wherever, and may range from installation and maintenance of a specific kind of printer, to training and support of your company's staff for the products and services you have purchased.  One of the most common types of on-site outsourcing is the processing and distribution of incoming mail, and the internal collection of outgoing mail for pick-up by mail-carriers.

FedEx Office, for example, provide an off-site web-to-print service where consumers can send their prepared file to high quality printers at a FedEx Office location. This is probably the simplest example of using an off-site vendor. In many cases, the relationship your business has with an off-site vendor will include a digital document library, version control and document package fulfillment.

The solution you select needs to integrate with your existing environment. A white paper published by InfoTrends, Inc., based in Weymouth, Mass., in June 2008, says “integration must be seamless not only in the document operations themselves, but also between the service providers' document services and their clients' systems and processes.”  Any service you purchase shouldn't require your business to significantly modify existing processes, the provider should be able to modify the product to meet your business requirements.

Most importantly, your solution provider should be able describe the immediate and long-term cost benefits of utilizing their products and services, including the savings in labor and materials typical of those offerings.

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