Companies are increasingly relying upon remote employees driving their sales and customer service efforts.  Embracing a geographically disbursed workforce makes perfect sense for both the employee and the employer because it promotes greater access to customers while reducing the costs of business real estate and travel expenditures.  In addition, studies indicate that companies benefit from increased employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention as a result of allowing their employees to work outside of the office.

Providing a fast, scalable, and secure network infrastructure for remote employees requires that IT departments rethink their existing architectures.  Historically corporate networks minimize their exposure to the outside world of hackers and malware by limiting entry points into the system from outside of the company’s firewall.  However with the increased demand to support remote employees, IT departments are researching new technologies that improve how they control and manage information flow from offsite resources.

To that end, ColumbiaSoft is engaged in developing solutions for a handful of Fortune 500 companies that provide simple, secure online access to their enterprise document management systems.  The user interfaces are tailored to specific roles in the organization in order to align the application functionality with the user’s specific job function.  This customized design provides a quick and efficient means for looking up account information and uploading company critical documents in seconds.

The online portal solutions provided by ColumbiaSoft support interactive searching against a company’s backend database system including CRM, ERP, or Accounting application.  By interfacing the document management system with other mission critical systems, the web interface design promotes minimal data entry along with accurate spelling and auto-populated supporting fields.  ColumbiaSoft also provides web-based drag/drop functionality allowing users to quickly drag multiple attachment files from Microsoft Outlook or Windows Desktop environments directly into the clients’ document management system.

Storing corporate records in a document management system provides numerous benefits enterprise wide that support both management and IT functions within an organization.  This includes fast searching on metadata and file content, records management capabilities, email archive, routing documents for digital signature and approval, compliance audit trails, version control, and much more. By providing simple, efficient solutions for external resources to share corporate documents, companies operate smarter and allow their workforce to focus on their core job functions.

The average office worker uses a sheet of paper every 12 minutes, over 10,000 sheets of paper a year, and disposes of 100 to 200 pounds of paper annually. Document management helps businesses reduce the need for paper, and take a paperless approach. With paperless document management software, businesses store and share paper electronically so that the need for printing and shipping of paper documents is reduced.

While offering a positive impact on the environment through less paper production and transportation, reducing the use of paper also provides for cost savings by improving business efficiency. The cost of handling, storing and shipping a single sheet of paper can add up to as much as $30.00 over a document’s lifecycle. When managed electronically, the actual cost of paper, storage facilities, and mailing or shipping are eliminated.

Business processes are improved using electronic collaboration tools that make sharing of documents easy with workflow routing, versioning, notifications, and approvals. Scanning tools capture paper documents and turn them into electronically searchable digital files, reducing the need for document storage and speeding document retrieval.

In addition to an all-around paperless office solution for managing electronic files, digitized paper documents, and email records, document management offers specific paperless business solutions in areas of: Accounts Payable routing and approval; electronic project collaboration; HR employee records management; compliance and regulatory document control; remote access for customers, vendors and partners; and more.

To learn more about growing a greener business, paperlessly, with electronic document management software visit ColumbiaSoft’s booth at the Energy Trust Better Living Show in Portland this weekend March 26th - 28th.

http://www.betterlivingshow.org/

A recent trend I am seeing with our customers is the desire to enhance their business infrastructure to support having employees work remote.  This arrangement benefits businesses in a number of ways including helping employee morale, allows for business continuity when weather strikes, saves space on real estate, and allows for increased productivity from their staff.

Creating an environment permitting employees to work remotely requires providing online access to critical information and documents.  At minimum, employers will need to enable remote access to their network environment and online computer systems.  However for most companies who are not paperless, acquiring information contained in filing cabinets and binders is simply not possible for remote employees.  A similar challenge is the capability of routing paper documents received in the mail to remote workers in a timely manner.

Document management systems with support for digitally scanning paper documents provide real-time access to information to your remote employees.  It is not uncommon for me to help companies create processes that involve scanning common mail items including applications, claims, and change of business forms and then assigning those items for processing (via workflow) to resources that work remotely.  I also work with companies to back-scan legacy documents from countless rows of filing cabinets, freeing up square footage and providing for online retrieval and manageable disaster recovery processes.

By implementing a paperless process, your organization will gain efficiencies, increase employee morale, free up office space resources, and provide for business continuity should disaster strike.

While the technology that drives document management marches forward (Windows 7, SQL Server, .NET), the business objectives of the clients are essentially unchanged.  Clients greatly need solutions for scanning paper documents, applying index information, routing documents through workflow processes, maintaining document retention policies, collaborating around documents, providing for disaster recovery, and easily searching for documents.

Whether companies are large or small, the sheer amount of documents and data that companies must store and manage outpaces their capabilities using paper filing systems or shared file servers.  With a modern document management system installed, users index documents as they are saved.  This in conjunction with power database tools provides the users with the capability to instantly retrieve or aggregate documents.  As an example, Document Locator is commonly deployed in an Accounts Payable process where documents are indexed with Company Name, Invoice Date, Check Number, and Amount.  By incorporating these index tags with document management, employees could easily retrieve all of the documents and approval notes for invoices received in the last 3 months that exceeded $20K via a web browser working from home.

In the economic downturn companies are struggling to maintain their business output while searching for ways to reduce costs.  Sadly this leads to layoffs and increased burden on those remaining in the organization.  While the natural tendency is to pull back spending, strategic investment in software that increase productivity can help maximize the resources you have remaining to drive your core business.

Part 5 – A Viable Solution

Realizing the benefits of effectively organizing and indexing documents is only the tip of the iceberg when you consider the possibilities provided by a fully-featured document management system.  I have witnessed how companies have successfully refocused their employees from performing unproductive roles like constantly searching lost documents into roles that directly derive revenue for the organization.

Here are a few ways that document management helps your organization:

• Workflow – Eliminates manually routing documents for approval and physical signature.  Through automated workflow solutions documents are automatically routed to individuals for approval and digital signatures.  This includes an electronic audit trail and provides remote users easy access to approve documents.

• eDiscovery – The threat of litigation against companies and the associated subpoena of documents is a nightmare scenario for many companies.  If your company employs document management policies and tools for document indexing, records retention management, and document distribution, inquires for information can be handled quickly and efficiently.

• Document Scanning – By digitally scanning and archiving paper documents in your organization you gain great efficiencies searching on documents while providing a simple means of business continuity through disaster recovery.

• Version Control – When creating documents using a version control system, the author can record snapshots of their document at any point in the document lifecycle. This permits the author to lock in a version of the document for historical purposes that can be referenced later in the development cycle.

• Subscriptions – Receive automatic email messages notifying you when documents are modified or added into the system. 

ColumbiaSoft Document Locator is one such system with a proven track record of helping companies organize their documents.  ColumbiaSoft Document Locator provides a document management system that is integrated directly into Microsoft Windows 7 and Microsoft Office.  The ingenious design creates a user interface that appears in Windows like a shared map drive and appears in Microsoft Office applications as its own ribbon in the toolbar.  By embedding document management functionality directly into the applications that are used everyday, employees can seamlessly transition to using powerful document management functionality without significant investment in training and changing their regular work routines.

Part 4 – Productivity with Document Management

Document management systems are designed to provide organizations with the tools necessary to capture and leverage their electronic content.  Modern document management systems will at minimum incorporate traditional indexing and searching functionality.  More advanced document management systems include integration with Microsoft Windows 7, workflow routing, digital signatures, records retention policies, event subscriptions, compliance audit logs, scanning interfaces, email archive features and more.

Historically companies have invested very little effort in managing their corporate documents.  Many companies throw away countless resource hours annually searching for documents, or they have given up finding documents altogether and simply reproduce work because of their inability to quickly locate business critical documents.

By not implementing corporate document policies and tools, document storage chaos evolves with users storing documents on their private network shares (or local computers), using their own naming standards, version identifiers, and folder structure design.  This results in information that is indefinitely siloed; useful only to the original author because of the storage conventions used, lack of records management policies applied, and the inability to include index information to facilitate searching. The problem is compounded when email archiving is brought into play.

Part 5 – up next, A Viable Solution

Part 3 – Managing the Output

The increase in performance in Windows 7 matched with new computer hardware provides unprecedented power to the end user.  At no point in history have ordinary users been empowered with the tools to produce the quantity and quality data that Windows 7 and Microsoft Office provides.  It’s commonplace for modern computers to be used for document publishing, digital photography, internet research, email communications, electronic scanning, graphical design and more.

The benefits of working digitally are compelling for so many reasons (environmental benefits, disaster recover, 24×7 access, security, and office space requirements), yet it comes at a cost.  As users increasingly leverage computers to generate electronic output, there is an equal increase in their requirements for properly storing and managing the content.

The problem of managing electronic content is forcing many companies to ask “how can we continue to amass endless quantities of data and keep that data fresh and relevant to our staff?”  The answer for many is Document Management.

Part 4 – up next, Productivity with Document Management

Part 2 – Examining the Hype

Windows Vista’s lack-luster commercial adoption coupled with a relentless onslaught of clever marketing by arch rival Apple compelled Microsoft to get Windows 7 right.

The invention of Microsoft Windows came about to provide users access to applications and configuration options that were once only available from the command prompt. With the popular Windows 3.1, gone were the cryptic green screens common with DOS, replaced with a colorful point-and-click operating system that everyone could easily understand.  That was 1992 – user’s expectations have increased considerably since then.

Today’s PC consumers demand user-centric operating systems that are engaging, graphical, multitasking, mobile, and fast.  For the best ideas of what to incorporate into Windows 7, Microsoft enlisted their most creative and knowledgeable resources – their customers.  They learned that users perceive computers as much more than computational and word processing tools.  Modern computing plays a role in every aspect of our lives including work, entertainment, scheduling, education and more.  Users of Windows 7 agree that Microsoft was successful in listening to their customers and incorporating popular enhancements into the new operating system. 

The following is a small sampling of what you can look forward to in Windows 7:
- Quicker access to programs and files using the Taskbar Pin feature and Jump lists.
- Better access to application dialogs with intelligent resizing tools
- Built-in Windows Search service for faster searching
- Easier file sharing for home users
- Windows Media Center improvements for videos, music, and internet TV
- Enhanced video editing capabilities
- Intuitive tools for connecting to wireless networks
- Accelerated startup and resume processes
- Support for touch screen monitors
- Increased plug and play technology for hardware devices

Part 3 – up next, Managing the Output.

In 1981, New Jersey CPA David Casey founded the Construction Financial Management Association (CFMA) to provide a forum for gathering and exchanging ideas as well to provide educational programs for construction finance professionals.  CFMA has since transformed from a small regional association into a national organization with over 7,000 members including general contractors, subcontractors, developers, construction managers, architects, engineers, and suppliers.

Each year CFMA hosts a conference and exhibition bringing together thousands of like-minded construction finance professionals for several days of education, sharing, and camaraderie.  The conference features educational classes through CFMA’s Schools of Learning in addition to showcased speakers and exhibit booths displaying the hottest products and technologies driving the industry forward.  This year’s CFMA 2009 Conference is being held May 16th through May 20th  at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas – the site of the original CFMA national conference in 1982.

A prevailing theme to this years’ CFMA conference is the need for builders to address the exponential growth in electronic and paper file management involved with construction.  Files include emails, invoices, drawings, insurance records, certification of completions, permits, and more.  The mountain of paperwork required for an average construction project can fill up an entire trailer.   Unfortunately this paperwork robs profits by consuming resources for filing documents, retrieving them, and storage costs.  It also exposes companies to the risk of eDiscovery litigation.

ColumbiaSoft is attending this year’s CFMA conference as an exhibitor demonstrating Document Locator, a paperless office solution for construction companies.  Paperless office solutions, also known as document management solutions, offer construction companies many capabilities.   Document Locator digitally archives paper documents, electronically stores them, and indexes them based on client-specified criteria, and has workflow automation.  In addition, paperless office solutions help facilitate disaster recovery planning and reduce the exposure associated with eDiscovery requests.

Paperless office solutions allow construction companies to amass a central repository containing all of the critical documents typically silo’d by departmental applications.  As an example, users outside of accounting could access all of the invoice documents related to their project without requiring access to the accounting software or directly contacting accounting with their requests.  This type of open collaboration between employees, vendors, and subcontractors provides substantial benefits to project team members allowing them real-time access to the information required to perform their tasks.  If you are interested in learning more about how paperless office solutions could benefit your construction company, please do not hesitate to stop by our booth at CFMA to learn more.

Brava! Desktop is an affordable, easy to use application designed for viewing, printing, and marking-up documents and drawings. Brava! Desktop provides support for most major document formats including MS Office Documents, CAD and other engineering formats, as well as PDF format types. By using a powerful markup/viewer application, users have the advantage of being able to open proprietary file formats such as Autodesk CAD, Bentley MicroStation, and Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks 3-D models without owning the original development software or a purpose built viewer for each application.

What truly sets Brava! Desktop apart though, is the ability to markup and annotate files for collaboration. For example, an engineering firm can distribute floor plan drawings for review to the contracted architect and construction company, allowing them to digitally markup each drawing where they have questions. Brava! Desktop is purpose built for this form of paperless collaboration and includes powerful AEC industry features including measurements, drawing magnification, stamping, markup burn-in, save as PDF, and more.

When viewing and digital markup technology are incorporated into an existing document management system that supports metadata searching, workflow routing, notifications, security, records management, remote web access, and email archive – you have a full featured project file management system that will allow collaboration within the organization and to outside vendors, suppliers, sub-contractors, and more. Imagine a system were design drawings (submittals/transmittals) were automatically routed to the necessary reviewers for the project and their responses were electronically captured and returned.

Included in the next release of Document Locator v5.3 will be integration into Informative Graphics Brava! Desktop 2.2 – previous integration support included up version 1.3 of Brava! Desktop. In addition to supporting the latest release, functionality is expanded, allowing users to create and apply dynamic stamps using Brava! Desktop that automatically extract profile property information from Document Locator as the stamp is applied. This means that generic stamps can be employed that will dynamically embed project related information onto drawings including project number, project engineer, or dates by reading the values from the metadata associated with the drawing that is open.