In one of my conversations with one of our clients, whose preference was leaning towards the selection of on premise electronic document management systems.
The thought process was that even if there is a budget dedicated to an electronic document management system, it will be a one time spend and that’s it.
The company had accumulated paper documents for quite a number of years and was taking too much space in their office. They were also struggling to search for documents which would even take days or even months to get or not be found at all.
The Company’s executive had discussed this and concluded that having an electronic document management solution would sort out this problem once and for all.
They really needed to do this to save their relationships with their customers and suppliers. The long search for documents and missing documents would be quite detrimental to their business and they had already lost some customers because of delayed documentation. They decided to go ahead with the plans despite the financial constraints.
They all went out of their way to search for a good solution that would be a good fit for their company. They decided to look for a system that is:
Affordable and would not really cause a big dent in the company’s budget. Business had really slowed down during the Covid shut downs and they didn’t have much funds at their disposal.
- Pick a solution that they would make a one time payment have it implemented.
They also felt safe having a system installed in their premises. They thought that having a cloud system would compromise the security of their information.
Given their inhibitions, the need to make comparisons was necessary to ease their decision making. And because of this we made comparisons between On premise electronic document management system and Cloud electronic document management system to help them make a decision on which one would be a good fit.
Why go for an electronic document management system
Documents have been there for eons and they will always be there, whether in their paper form or digital form.
With the increase in the internet comes the increase in information to be stored. How a company manages and stores all these documents will depend on its strategy otherwise they can become overwhelmed.
An electronic document management system is a software that is integrated with other internal systems to manage the creation, organization, storage and access of digital documents within a company’s workflow process.
Electronic document management systems are important in a company to drive efficiency in service delivery and also reduce costs in work processes.
It will also eliminate the loopholes of losing documents and time taken to search for required documents.
On premise electronic document management system.
An on premise electronic document management system is installed in a clients premise on their computers. With an on premise electronic document management system an IT Team has to be available to manage the system on a continuous basis. Thus the salary for the IT team has to be factored in when budgeting for installation of an on premise electronic document management system.
What are the features and capabilities of an On premise electronic document management system.
On premise electronic document management systems have certain features and capabilities that will iron out your work flows to increase productivity and efficiency. These include capturing of documents through scan, importing, imaging and full text indexing.
With an on premise electronic document management system you can edit your documents without changing the original format or you can also change the document if there is need. You can also manage different document versions and associate them with related documents.
With an on premise electronic document management system, you can have full searches using keywords and metadata, folder, file structures and indexing.
With an on premise electronic document management system, there is user access from any web browser regardless of the operating system and integration can be done with ERP, CRM or any other application in use.
On cloud electronic document management system
With on the cloud electronic document management system, you can subscribe as a user for the electronic document management software. Pricing is only based on the number of users and storage size. You don’t have to invest a huge amount of money on servers and other equipment in the initial stages when installing the on cloud electronic document management system.
With on the cloud electronic document management system flexibility and scalability is made easy.
What are the features and capabilities of an on cloud electronic document management system.
On the cloud electronic document management system has all the features and capabilities of the on premise electronic document management system plus more additional features.
Some of the additional features on the cloud electronic document management system include automated classification and intelligent indexing and barcode reading.
With the on cloud electronic document system data synchronization with other applications is enabled.
The on cloud electronic document management system can be accessed through the mobile application.
On cloud electronic document management system has additional features of managing tasks, forwarding, notifications and lists.
On the cloud electronic document management system has automated process control with the use of a workflow manager and preconfigured solutions.
Conclusion
The choice on whether to go for an on premise electronic document management system or on the cloud electronic document management system depends on the resources and the needs of the company. Though for dynamic growth and scalability on the cloud electronic document management system beats them all.
You can also opt for an hybrid electronic document management system whereby you are using the on the cloud electronic document management system for document storage and the on premise electronic document management system for your workflows.