Road to Successfully Implementing an EDMS

November15

‘We want an EDRMS or is it an EDMS’- that’s a conversation every CEO has had with his team. And if your CEO hasn’t, that’s going to happen soon.

To any CEO, the acquisition of an EDMS is deemed to be the final solution to myriad of problems affecting their businesses and loos of documents.

Over the years and tens of interactions with CEOs across the divide, here are keen steps to ensuring your organization achieves maximum returns on investment on acquiring the EDMS.

For starters, the EDMS (Electronic Document Management System) is universally identified as a type of software that stores, organizes, and manages documents in the form of electronic files for an organization.

Its implementation should be preceded by a series of activities which may take a year or ages to set the stage for the EDMS

Streamlining Records Management

This is a huge task that covers: Personnel, Storage, and Compliance.

Most of the organizations seeking to digitize and automate their processes lack properly equipped personnel to manage physical records, which meant that the transition to electronic records shall not be seamless.

Storage is key to ensuring the security of the records. Without a proper records center and its security managed, the access cant be well monitored as well as the risk of the loss (call it theft) of the physical records. Critical to this is also the ease of access to the physical records when requested.

Compliance is a key component in records management. This enables one to have set guidelines in internal management of records as well as periodic surveys and inventory to ascertain the status of the records.

Records Appraisal

Every document has a Lifecycle. Identifying this enables you to also understand the records you keep, and their disposition model (Archive or Destroy).

In so doing you enable your organization to achieve two things. First is to set the EDMS well to dispose the records as at set time. The second is to enable the organization not scan records that should have already been disposed of.

One may ask if this is important to all. Disposition of records is not a preserve of the public organizations, its also very important to private sector ones.

Planning/Needs Analysis

They say failing to plan is planning to fail. From the onset, the implementation of the EDMS is a project that affect various departments, has financial implications, may lead to changes of personnel as well as how organizations work.

To this effect its prudent that a budget is not the first thing you look at, but the various items that will have to fall in place before you implement it.

These activities include: Identifying organizational needs, Standards in place, the work of the system once implemented (basic EDMS or Worflow shall be part of it), Staff training, ICT Technical Training on EDMS, Organizational Streamlining of Processes, Staffing where need be, Benchmarking with industry peers, Clients feedback on the new changes, Policies and procedures re-evaluation, Internal development of System features and finally development of the system specifications.

The end point before procuring is to determine its would be cost of procuring vs Returns on Investment