Until a few decades ago, the concept of digital document solutions was unknown. Every business relied on paper and manual entries for documentation. Everything from contracts and minutes of the meeting to policies and guidelines was paper-based. These were printed and passed around to get signatures, approvals and acceptances. There was no concept of digitally attaching a soft copy in an email for virtual analysis. If someone were to be absent on that day or out for meetings, this entire process would get delayed till the person required was physically present.
When technology began entering every sphere of life, businesses too jumped on that bandwagon. With everything moving into a computer, hard drive, and cloud storage and becoming accessible from any location globally, companies could be more swift and secure with documentation transitioning to pixels from paper.
While digital documentation offers several benefits, problems persist. The entire concept of documentation is to convey a message or pass on information, both internally to the staff and externally to vendors and external customers. This sets the prerequisite for content consistency, easy accessibility, and hassle-free management; these aspects become essential to the saucerful digitization of documentation. If something contrary to this results in inaccessible, inconsistent and unmanageable digital documentation, your organization’s ability to effectively send information will become impossible, leading to misunderstanding, chaos and increased cost.
To drive consistency, ease and achieve the actual benefits of digital documentation, enterprises need to follow a few digital documentation best practices.
Benefits of Digital Documentation
Digital documentation ensures ease of management as compared to paper documents. Paper documentation is characterized by manual efforts, such as manual archiving, finding storage space and then searching for a suitable record.
Digital Documentation solutions provide easy accessibility as they can be shared virtually and instantly. This real-time transfer and data access reduces the response time and eliminates courier costs. Through email and cloud solutions, it becomes easily accessible to your employees and by putting it up on social media or your website, customers can access it easily. Research by Gartner claims that for every $1 spent on document printing costs the company $6 as they now have to spend on managing and allotting these documents. All this paper eventually does go to waste.
Digital documentation is safer and does not even require to be hidden behind a lock. On the contrary, paper documentation can be stolen, end up in the wrong hands, be copied, read and shared with whoever. Digital documentation poses no such threat as it can be password protected and accessed by only those intended to. Paper data breaches can harm companies and governments as well.
Digital documentation solutions are more beneficial to the environment. Due to global warming and the earth’s danger, everyone is trying hard to reduce their carbon footprint. Not using paper is a crucial effort direct toward this goal. Businesses globally are adopting the route of digital documentation to bring down their paper usage and combat deforestation.
Substituting paper-intensive documentation by onboarding Digital Documentation solutions & e sign solutions can give a company end-to-end control and complete transparency. By using innovative digital, cloud-based, and automated solutions and enabling electronic signing, companies can be sure that documents will be delivered in real-time and securely to all stakeholders involved.
