We have all heard the common adage - Too many cooks spoil the broth - this is applicable to many situations outside the kitchen. A common place this phenomenon occurs, is in the area of document creation and the subsequent maintenance (or lack thereof) of Document Management Systems (DMS).
Regardless of the size of an organization, the process of document management and creation can encounter a myriad of problems. Observing the large number of published articles providing tips on how to “better manage” your DMS, it is clear that there indeed exists a widespread problem.
TEMPLATES AND VERSION CONTROL
Template creation and management is where the “too many cooks” issue is perhaps most relevant. We call this ‘document chaos’. Version control issues are a common complaint within many organizations. With many template versions being created (and re-created), by numerous staff, over a period of months, or even years, there exists the potential to create an infinite number of templates.
Many employees editing document templates do not have the knowledge or the experience to be doing so; changes are implemented on individual computers, in different files; changes upon changes with no version control; not to mention the staff members have no idea which template they should be using in the first place!
Considering that only ONE of these templates may be correct and accurate – in a large organization, the magnitude of this template-disaster/snowball-effect is significant.
COMPLIANCE
Compliance is an important issue for many organizations – in particular financial and legal institutions. To ensure all documents are both personalized and legally compliant takes a considerable amount of training, and time. It is important that the person (or often persons) responsible for compliance, possess the level of knowledge necessary to adhere to legal requirements.
If “every man and his dog” is fiddling with templates – quality assurance is highly compromised, and this equates to legal issues and no end of hassle.
TEMPLATE MIGRATION
When updating to the latest version of windows, many organizations experience broken macros; this results in un-readable files. To remedy this occurrence, IT support is required. This is not only expensive, but also time consuming and creates considerable disruptions in organizational productivity.
WHAT TO DO?
How do you manage this? How do you ensure that every staff member utilizes the right template, containing the most recent and correct information/branding and legal requirements? How do you keep templates up to date? Especially when many industry documents require constant changes to adhere to legislation or compliance standards?
What if there was an easier way to maintain content management systems? Better yet, what if all of these issues could be avoided in the first place? What if you could easily generate documents that are guaranteed to be accurate, fast and reliable; therefore, easily managed maintained and retrieved? Moreover, what if this process of document automation also captured important metadata relevant to a specific document, and automatically pushed this data into the Document Management System?
After all, prevention is always better than a cure.
THE INTELLEDOX SOLUTION
Intelledox enables the production of high-quality documentation that is fast, individually tailored, consistent and 100% accurate.
Template control is simple. To update templates, authorized administrators can make changes in the Intelledox content Library, or in the source MS Word template and amendments are rolled out across the entire organization. Consequently, there are no version control issues, no branding issues, no legislative problems and compliance is a breeze.
Intelledox is MS Word version independent – meaning that template migration is simple and files are guaranteed to be retrievable in the future – regardless of the version of software. Additionally, consistent key words and labels are automatically allocated to relevant files; there is no more “guessing” where files should go and where they can be found.
Essentially, Intelledox prevents document “garbage” entering your DMS. This is important, as high quality documents and files are immensely easier to manage and maintain. Intelledox solves the problem at the source - document creation - and therefore eliminates many of the common issues related to DMS.
No matter how complicated your document requirements are - Intelledox will make your organization more productive and efficient, while eliminating the risk of human error in document creation.
To learn how Intelledox can help your organization avoid the myriad of DMS management issues, please contact Intelledox.