Which Industries are Beginning to Use a Document Management System?
Document management system use is prevalent in major industries such as accounting, manufacturing, financial services, insurance, and healthcare practice management. However, it is also used prevalently yet on smaller scales within the following industries, and here’s how it has left its impact.
Construction Document Management
The DMS use in the construction industry is built upon manual labor, technical skill, and environmental consideration—making it an industry requiring a diverse set of worker skills. However, planning difficulties, a lack of experienced workers, and project inflexibility/deadlines are among the several most pressing issues the industry faces.
Although it is not the fault of the construction worker, motivation remains an issue for workers in this industry—this lack of motivation can be tied to the planning difficulties the industry faces, because if workers do not know how to proceed with projects, especially under inflexible conditions, finding the motivation necessary to act quickly and efficiently becomes a difficult psychological task.
The ability to facilitate change management through a document management system can assist the construction industry in making projects more flexible and ever-changing plans clearer. Additionally, many construction companies have difficulty managing growth, in large part because of the decentralization of information this growth brings. This is yet another issue that can be resolved through the satellite and remote access feature of a document management system.
The collocation of information through a document management system’s satellite/remote access provides construction workers (especially those who make use of cloud-based DMS) with the ability to manage the information necessary to clarify worker responsibilities via workflow and other collaboration features.
Funeral Homes and Cemeteries Document Management
Unlike many of the other industries mentioned in this eBook, the document management system in funeral homes and cemeteries industry is increasingly tasked with the need to personalize funeral services based on the requests of decedents and their family members. Additionally, funeral planning has become a long-term endeavor. Those who are soon to pass are more frequently partaking in not just the writing of their own wills, but also their funeral plans while still alive, increasing the amount of information that funeral home managers must oversee.
This includes the number of funeral register books, general price lists, pre/at-need contracts, death certificate receipts, autopsies, decedents’ legal name forms, cremation forms, designation of intentions, insurance file forms, pensions, social security unions, and benefits of which to keep track.
Additionally, the duration of time funeral managers must keep these items on file varies drastically, and can be dramatically simplified by the automated deletion and retention feature of a document management system.
Not only can DMS help securely store the increasing amount of information funeral homes are expected to manage, it can also secure sensitive file information with sophisticated encryption—giving managers in this industry significant ease of use.
Nonprofit and Religious Organization Document Management
Nonprofits face two key challenges that DMS can prevent: an inability to meet the needs of employees who must work flexibly, and the revenue necessary to rely upon technology to streamline operations and ensure information security.
Inasmuch nonprofits are willing to overcome any aversion to cloud technology (the most cost-effective document management system offering), they can both reduce the cost of DMS use and enable flexible work hours/locations for their employees, because cloud-based DMS makes working from anywhere with an internet connection safe and secure.
Additionally, many nonprofits are already exploring ways of reducing their operating expenses, and the leasing of office space becomes unnecessary with the collaboration and security features a cloud-based document management system offers nonprofits.
Bookkeeping Document Management
Although akin to the accounting profession, bookkeeping demands an entirely different set of skills and therefore, an entirely different set of needs—many of which a document management system can resolve.
In fact, of all the occupations/industries listed in this guide, bookkeeping is most simplified by basic document management system features such as automated retention and deletion, secure storage of confidential information, and data management.
Instead of keeping track of accounts and financial transactions manually, such as storing them in a traditional filing cabinet, a document management system not only stores these securely, but also makes them retrievable—no matter how many business types the bookkeeper’s accounting firm or practice handles.
Additionally, understanding the operations of each client’s business is crucial for success as a bookkeeper, and a document management system organizes this information so that insight can be gained from it, enabling bookkeepers to better serve their clients. DMS also helps bookkeepers makes categorize transactions simpler and faster, mitigating the impact of yet another stressor bookkeeping personnel commonly endure.
Document Management in Credit Unions and Banks
Digital operations within credit unions and banks are swiftly evolving, even among some deserved uncertainty. These organizations must not only adapt to digital consumer preferences, but also balance these preferences with their remaining demographic of customers:
those who do not prefer digital or online banking/credit lending. However, it is both in consumers’ and credit and banking organizations’ best interest to move toward digital operations, especially as credit unions and banks invest more frequently in self-service channels that require secure paperless transactions.
These trends not only facilitate the demand for document management system use, but also allow consumers to demand clear information about how their transactions are processed, handled, and secured among these emergent technologies—making DMS both an explanatory tool for consumers and a safe, secure, centralized repository for information. Additionally, DMS minimizes a bank’s risks and significantly decreases regulatory burdens given the built-in security it offers to simplify compliance.
Transportation and Logistics Document Management
Whether in the airline, railway, or shipping industry, transportation companies are always collecting customer information and content, hoping to gain actionable insight from this information.
Although the industry generally succeeds in storing vast amounts of content and information, evidence suggests that most transportation companies fall behind other industries in structuring this information in a way that reveals actionable insight.
This is where DMS becomes applicable not only to the transportation industry as a whole—but also to the organizations comprising it as well. This draws attention to a transportation company’s information architecture.
In fact, analyses of the industry have deemed the transportation industry’s document management to be so heavily focused on more immediate measures of customer satisfaction that, in many cases, organizations in the industry forget to manage and track the internal processes that scale and reveal larger trends about the customer experience: an issue DMS fixes by providing a centralized repository for information across multiple offices and branch locations.
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