In consonance with the Indian Government’s Digital India vision and to improve efficiency and transparency within the department, many public and private organisations are completely shifting to a paperless office environment. This means digitisation and movement of office files electronically which ultimately helps in substantial reduction of processing and delivery time.
The role of Document Management System is therefore becoming more crucial as it helps organisations to manage tasks effectively and streamline processing of their documents across all departments. A case in point is Kirloskar Electric Company, which has improved its efficiencies significantly by implementing a comprehensive document management system.
“Our corporate document management system (CDMS ) project deals with safeguarding intellectual property of the company , improve the coordination and efficiency of engineering , production, planning and quality department in conjunction with other units,vendors and customers,” says Hemant Kulkarni, Deputy General Manager – Corporate IT, Kirloskar Electric Company Ltd. Kulkarni explains that before the implementation of CDMS in his company, users were using indents, memos, paper copies and registers to maintain information.
The tracking of these documents was difficult and users had to take multiple follow-ups with the end users/departments. The output of engineering couldn’t be measured due to manual processes. “After implementing CDMS, we have achieved a step closer to paperless office. As all the processes and workflows are mapped in CDMS, there is complete tractability and accountability on respective stake holders. The time taken for the approval cycle has come down significantly and the users are happy with respect to the transparency and automation bough by CDMS. Now it is a single source of truth for all the departments with respect to intellectual property and designs.”
In the Indian market, the need to increase efficiency has been the key driver. Organizations today need to be able to easily manage and access all structured content and documents using one piece of software.
Underlying Challenges
There is a fundamental structural change happening in the market where more and more companies are shifting from paper to electronic document management systems thereby benefiting from lower costs, enhanced productivity, better user controls and stronger security features.
But there are definite challenges to this growth part, of which awareness is one, shares Vijaykumar Rajendran – Product Manager, Zoho Docs. “Many firms in India still do not realise that the costs and risks of having a fragmented, decentralized document strategy are staggering. Even today, most companies neglect document management, in spite of the crucial role it plays in contributing to productivity and collaboration within teams. Most of the times, the reason behind this is that the costs are not visible and impact on organizational efficiency and productivity are not measured,” says Rajendran.
Most users are also not aware of the long term benefits of document management. “People are looking at immediate returns on their investments and ease of use. There are also challenges in terms of identifying and digitising large volume of data and information in paper based documents which is scattered among various departments and locations of an organisation,” states Rahul Kubadia, Primeleaf Consulting.
Increasing compliance requirements by multinational companies is another big trend that is driving the growth of document management adoption. As a DMS can manage the entire set of employee-related documents through the lifecycle of an employee (recruitment stage, association with the company, separation/exit and post-exit settlements), it is becoming more strategic in nature.
“The onus of managing employee documents is normally spread across several departments within an organisation – the HR department, Learning team, Operations team, Travel team, Finance team, CRM, etc. Many organisations underestimate the legal and compliance requirements of employee documents and more often than not, the HR and labor litigation teams of organisations scramble to dig up emails, old folder archives and collect feedback from many stakeholders in the organisation. Till date, most companies don’t have a signal repository of employee information. Today, many new-age and progressive companies understand this need not just from a compliance perspective, but also as a tool to manage business operations and talent management. If we add the employee related document management, the industry size will become more than double and most of the growth for future will come from this segment,” asserts Srinivasulu Mallampooty – Co-Founder & CEO, Employee Experts.
DMS moves towards the cloud
Cloud based document management solutions are gaining maximum popularity as users do not have to worry about infrastructure management and related issues. More and more organisations are preferring a completely browser based solution. This eliminates the desktop management and other related concerns.
Says Sunil Mehra, Vice President, Middleware, Oracle India, “Companies across industries are moving towards paperless documents and embracing digital platforms via cloud computing to build a robust, secure and collaborative work culture. They are using cloud based content collaboration solutions to integrate and assimilate content on the cloud as the documents can be accessed on-the-go.”
Harsh Tikku, Director, SoftAge believes that the next technology that will have seminal impact on DMS has to be the hybrid cloud. Data management will open up with new hybrid cloud cases. Says he, “As organisations move to a cloud delivery model to reduce costs and increase flexibility, they will shift from being builders and operators of their own data centers to being brokers of services than span both private and public cloud resources.” Tikku predicts that the next wave of technology advancement in the sphere of Document Management will focus on Digitisation and Analytics.
Indexing key to retrieving documents quickly
Organisations have a lot of information and timely availability is always a big question mark. Therefore they should have all their documents properly digitised and index it in such a way that it will be retrieved faster.
“Wherever you store your files, be it in-house, server or into the cloud, how soon you retrieve that information is the key word. And that can be done with proper indexing. A lot of organisations are getting their documents digitised but they haven’t done the proper indexing. Therefore, we are helping them with indexing. We take their entire documents, we index it properly, create a workflow and give it back to them. The organisations then start doing the process automatically. It helps the organisations move into a different level. Even if the documents are digitised and stored in servers, there’s no use, as it still takes ample time to retrieve it and find it. Organisations should start considering these factors instead of looking at document management solutions in isolation,” says K Bhaskhar, Vice President – Business Imaging Solution Division, Canon India.
Canon has recently launched a solution called Powerscan, which is from an organisation named IRIS. This software is more into effective capturing, indexing and retrieving documents. “The most important thing is that it can even compress an image to a large extent. This would help an organisation to download huge files quickly from anywhere. For example, through IRIS, a 30 GB file can be compressed to as small as a 2 GB file,” states Bhaskhar.
Accessing documents on the go
Thanks to a huge surge in enterprise mobility adoption, most organisations have started giving mobile printing and mobile scanning options to their users, where a document can be scanned and moved easily on the mobile phone. “We are providing these features on our products. Also, users can download drivers on the mobile phones from play stores, and then the documents can be scanned and stored. These elements are happening in mobile phones also because, Bring Your Own Device is becoming the need of the hour,” asserts Bhaskhar.
The social element is also playing a role in document management software. Says Virender Jeet, Sr. VP – Technology, Newgen Software,”A lot of companies are communicating on their social channels these days. You even have data coming in from sensors or business centers which are in context to customers. Hence, this information has to be retained. Our products have also evolved from pure image processing to capture all this data coming in from various sources. If you look at mobile content management – the mobile is becoming the primary device to deliver information. So, we have products like ZapIn for servicing customers for whom the core is mobile.”
Key business verticals and growth drivers
For Newgen, BFSI is the largest spender in terms of content management but the government vertical has also started catching up in the last 5 – 6 years with customers like LIC (Life Insurance Corporation of India) which happens to be the world’s largest content management deployment for the firm. “We have a lot of projects in the government space. Pharma is an interesting space while compliance management for manufacturing is very important. Segments like education, hospitality are relatively slow. With the entire era of digitisation, cloud has become more popular and mainstream, and the entry barrier which is the cost to acquire will go down,” informs Jeet.
Although the need for digitisation and document management is felt across verticals, there is a huge need which is being generated and consumed by organisations in verticals like telecom, BFSI, manufacturing, retail and education. “These verticals still heavily rely on paper based processes like new customer registration through KYC (Know your customer) forms and are looking to embrace simpler and efficient digitisation processes,” says Parikshet Singh Tomar, country category leader, Printing Systems, HP Inc. India.
Large enterprises too are looking to take complete advantage of the digitisation drive and thereby transitioning to more agile and efficient office environments in order to grow their global businesses. From an enterprise standpoint, Tomar informs that HP’s document management solutions address three major trends in enterprise printing: workflow digitisation, cloud and mobility. Workflow digitisation reduces the burden of a paper-heavy document system in several ways. It saves storage space, decreases paper consumption, reduces costs, saves time and makes document processes more efficient overall.
Manoj Kumar, Managing Director & CEO of Ricoh India Limited was of the view that, “Increased business activity in the IT, BFSI, education, government and SMB segments have contributed the most to the growth of Managed Document Services market in India. With the adoption of MDS, organizations are free to focus on more strategic issues and also are able to reduce cost at the same time. Ricoh`s MDS are equipped with all current and futuristic technologies to multi-fold productivity like cloud compatibility, remote device management, direct scan to e-mail recipients, conversion of scanned document to various editable formats, customizable Android based touch screen operating panels and various security features to protect the device and the print output.”
Going forward, as more organisations accelerate on the path of digitisation, expect document management systems to become more leaner (to be accessible on mobile platforms), social (tuned for collaboration) and cloud-enabled.
