After Design: Document Management System Implementation

Our Journey to Paperless: Design | Main Page | After Implementation: Let’s Start the Training and Go Live!

Now that our projects or file cabinets are designed with the paper terminology we need, we are ready to get this project rolling. Based on your organization, you first need to decide if the document management system should be behind your own firewall or if it should be hosted in a secure environment which allows someone else do the work.

Questions:

• Do I have the IT staff and infrastructure to support an electronic management system?
• Do I have management and staff that are uncomfortable with the cloud?
• Do I want to spend the money at the project’s start or over time?
• What do I expect my volumes to be and in what period of time?
• Is my location as secure as the hosted location?
• How quickly do I want to go live?
• What is the timeline on the system?
• How should it be hosted to get the best ROI?

These are just a few things you need to think about when making a system versus hosted solution. Documents management software hosted solutions can take as little as two weeks to become functional. In house systems can also be quick depending on who is championing the project, but normally are not live as fast as the hosted system.

Hosted content management systems can start as low as $100 a month with approximately $2,500 in capital expenditure. In house systems are normally licensed by concurrent users. If you are able to start slow with just a few people accessing the system and already have IT staff and infrastructure, it may make sense to go in house. If you have multiple locations with multiple users, you may want to use a hosted solution.

If you want to convert paper to electronic documents with a risk associated with the behavior, you may want to start with a hosted solution to minimize the upfront cost and the risk.

There is much to think about when implementing a document management system, but I can tell you that the majority of organizations that have made the conversion to a paperless office would never go back to paper. The ROI on these projects are normally some of the fastest return on investments of any technology upgrade.

There are good reasons to think about why to switch to paperless.

Paperless Steve