The benefits of document management solutions hinge on their ability to improve your business processes without changing them too much. While one reason to choose document imaging - that you're drowning in paper files - is fairly obvious, there are benefits to be had across a wide range of situations and industries.

Reasons to turn to document management solutions
More and more industries are falling under the influence of legislation that requires specific procedures for record keeping. Financial services companies need to be able to prove that information is unaltered to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley; medical practices have to prove that their records are safe from prying eyes to comply with HIPPA. The legal industry also has specific requirements related to discovery, including full-text searching of massive amounts of documents.

For businesses in these more regulated industries, document management solutions are by far the best way to ensure compliance with strict security and record-keeping rules. It's important to note that such systems only help your company become compliant, they don't guarantee it. But, the right procedures and behaviors do. No matter how secure your electronic records are, if an employee prints sensitive information and takes it to lunch, you're not in compliance.

Departmental applications
Because they benefit business units shared by almost all companies, document management solutions are used in a broad spectrum of businesses. Human resources and accounting departments, traditional heavy users of paper files, are huge beneficiaries of document management.

In addition, the Patriot Act's requirements of immediate government access to records apply to a wide range of businesses, and ISO 9000/9001 certification efforts can also benefit from document management. Manufacturing and government are two sectors that pursue document management solutions for these broader regulatory reasons.

Any organization that wants to put more processes in place can benefit as well. Document management solutions are used to enforce naming conventions, ensure strict approval processes are followed, and generally add consistency to existing procedures.

One example of document management in action comes from a BuyerZone.com vendor who worked with a salmon distributor in Seattle. Every summer, they used to move their entire operation to Anchorage for fishing season - including putting their corporate servers and pallets full of paper files on a barge and sailing them up the coast. At the end of the summer, they'd pack everything up and get back on the barge.

Not the most efficient business plan, perhaps, but they couldn't operate without their records. Once their document management solution was in place, all they had to do was bring a laptop and small scanner with them to Anchorage, and they could still access all their records as if they were back in Seattle.