Document Management - White Paper (ID 5277).pdf Jul. 2014 | Page 10

Time Savings
Looking for an item in a file cabinet and not finding it happens quite
a bit. In fact, employees spend one-fifth of their day looking for hard
copies, and in only 50% of the cases do they find the information in
the expected place1.
Labor expended for file hunting is by far the biggest expense
related to paper record systems. In some cases, employees never
find the document in question at all, and the staff has to repeat the
work to produce it again, adding to the drain on resources.
One witnesses similar slowdowns with digital files when they reside
in the traditional PC-folder structure in the absence of a document
management framework. As employees create new folders in ad
hoc fashion, files become increasingly disorganized. Over time,
digital content is saved on different servers and workstations, in
different folders, under different names. Much like paper systems,
employees go to look for the most current version of the file, but
have to check multiple possible locations.

Given that such a large portion of an employee’s day consists of file
handling, there is then ample opportunity to increase staff efficiency
through simple measures of electronic document management.
A document management system typically indexes each item with
specific keywords, keeping all data content searchable companywide. Employees can bring up the right document in seconds,
without rifling through the wrong drawers or pecking through PC file
locations. Digital document management significantly reduces the
time for routine file search and retrieval while largely eliminating the
interruptions in work caused by misplaced information.
Companies with document management systems find quicker project
completion and faster and more accurate response to information
requests.

Dutch Separation Engineering
Oil & gas projects move forward faster with process-integrated DMS
“It all comes down to a major time saver,” says Nanco Eelman, one of two partners of the
offshore engineering firm, Dutch Separation Engineering (DSE) Oil & Gas. “A formal workflow,
quick document searches, and auto-fill templates all keep our projects moving forward. We
actually help our customers stay on track. We’ll get an item from our client and we tell them, ‘no
actually, that’s not the right version. We already received this other one.’”
The partners implemented a document management solution to complement their existing
engineering-based software. They knew from past experience that simply storing files in project
folders on a hard drive leads to almost immitigable disorder.
“If you were looking for specific documents a year later for a certain project, finding them often
took a lot of your day,” he says. “It was also hard to determine the status of the documents
--exactly where a drawing or contract document was in the revision process.”
DSE Oil & Gas selected M-Files as its document management solution to gain greater control of
their business documents, information, and processes. M-Files indexes each new document with
metadata -- embedded keywords that include a basic set of descriptive attributes, such as client
name and contact information, document type, as well as its revision status.
The metadata also populates form-templates on recurring documents automatically. In an
AutoCAD template, an engineer types in the project number in one field, and the M-Files auto-fill
utility supplies the rest of the essential project data.
“The M-Files templates save us an enormous amount of time when we generate a project
completion file for all our final work. Previously, we had to open all the documents, open the
headers, change them, and save everything. But now, M-Files updates the headers automatically.
What would have taken us half a day before, we can now do in M-Files in a half an hour.”

Time Savings
EASY DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT

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