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What is the cost of an electronic document management system? The cost on an electronic document management system is a question which is always being asked by our clients who have shown interest in procuring it. Providing the cost of an electronic document management system cannot have a straight forward answer because each company’s needs are different. To know a company’s need there are quite a number of factors that influence the cost. These are the factors we will look at.
Electronic document management system minimizes the time taken in the workflow process of a company to speed up delivery to both the internal and external stakeholders for example clients, suppliers.
And if there are any paper documents within a company’s systems, they are converted into digital format and inputted into the Electronic document management system to create a flawless workflow. This should not be hindered or stopped because of loopholes caused by paper documents.
The cost of an electronic document management system is not one size fits all. An electronic document management system is customized to each and every individual company’s needs. That is why an in depth evaluation of the company’s processes have to be done to determine a company’s needs.This has to be done with due diligence so as not to miss out any loophole.
The cost of an electronic document management system is determined by a number of factors. The cost will be determined by the size of the company, the number of users, the types of user license, the number of integrations, the number of branches and the support required. We will have a look at these factors one by one.
Size of the company
The size of the company determines how many users will be given accessibility rights either as a read only license or a read and write license. A solution for a company with one branch will most likely be of a lower cost than one with a number of branches.
A company with a number of branches will most likely have a central repository for all their documents, though this is determined by the business model. The integration of the systems in all the branches will obviously be additional costs.
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Sign upNumber of users
There are different types of users who can have access to the digital documents in an electronic document management system and this includes the administrator of the system.
There is the read only user license. These users can only read the documents but are not able to edit anything on the document.
There is the read and write user license. These are users who can read the documents and can also make changes to the documents. They can also approve documents by appending an electronic signature or any other change that might be necessary.
The cost of an EDMS will be determined by how many read only user licenses the company needs and how many read and write user licenses it needs. The higher the number of users the higher the cost of the electronic document management system being put in place.
Type of user license
As discussed above there are different types of user license, read only user license and read and write user license. The read and write user license cost is usually on the higher side in comparison to a read only license.
The number of user licenses is determined by the company’s requirement. And it differs from one company to the other. If a company requires read only licenses the cost will be lower than if they had to go for more read and write user licenses.
Number of integrations
How much software do you have to integrate with your electronic document management system? You could be having a number of systems in place before you decided to incorporate an electronic document management system. For a proper workflow process across all the internal and external stakeholders, these systems have to be integrated.
These systems include the CRM (Customer relationship management) software, HRM (Human resource management) software, accounting software and many others. For the work process to be seamless these systems have to be integrated. The higher the number of integrations the higher would be the cost.
Number of Company branches
How many branches does your company have? The more branches a company has, the higher will be the cost of implementation. This is to ensure all the branches are linked in the implementation to improve collaboration and sharing of documents.
This would help reduce the cost of document movement between branches.
Number of departments
Number of departments would also determine the cost of an electronic document management system.
The more the branches a company has the higher would be the cost of implementation of an electronic document management system.
Conclusion
Thus determining the actual cost of an electronic document management system does have a straightforward answer as we may tend to assume.
Before you are given the cost of an electronic document management system all these factors have to be taken into consideration.