WHAT IS DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT?

The aim of most businesses is to remain profitable and to grow in the marketplace. However, as a business grows so does the amount of information flowing in, out and around the business. This can lead to an increase of unforeseen costs such as a wasteful use of office space, a wasteful use of time in filing, retrieving and re-filing, possible risk of lost documents and so on. All of these add up to a massive drain on company resources and profits.

An Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) is a tool that aims to resolve these issues by removing (or at least reducing) the amount of paper in an organisation and hence increase productivity.

Electronic systems first started appearing around the early 1980's and although they were a giant leap forward from the paper-based and microfilm systems, they were still limited in functionality and flexibility. They have evolved since then due to end-user requirements and the availability of new technologies to incorporate multi-users, workflow, document flow and security.

With the advent of the Internet, businesses realised that company information could be made available immediately to employees regardless of their location on the planet.