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Trends in DMS

Understaffed? 5 Time-Saving Administrative Hacks

Do more with less—reduce manual effort and increase efficiency with time-saving techniques and business process automation tools.

October 8, 2024

Professional enjoying work

Divert your time and resources to more meaningful work.

Time is perhaps one of your most valuable business assets. With the growth of knowledge work across industries, organizations benefit greatly from diverting time from repetitive tasks to creativity, innovation, and problem-solving.

Teams that can streamline tedious processes and find ways to communicate more efficiently will have better collaboration and productivity. Organizations that run on efficient processes can accomplish more with existing staff and scale more quickly.

Several strategies can help you significantly speed up day-to-day projects, minimize errors, and conserve resources. Whether you want to enhance your current systems or find new ways to improve performance, implementing these best practices can help you reclaim daily hours and do faster, better work.

Standardize your processes

Establishing standardized processes for routine tasks helps eliminate process-related confusion and errors, ensuring tasks are completed consistently across the organization.

Predefining steps in a given process helps your team know what to expect while reducing the need for manual oversight. 

A DMS can store and enforce standardized processes by providing step-by-step guides, checklists, and access to necessary documents. It can also help track compliance with these processes, ensuring everyone follows the same procedures and reducing the time spent on corrections and rework.

Automate core tasks and seek continuous improvements

Essential operational functions often rely on repetitive manual tasks, but automating these tasks reduces the amount of time and number of staff required to get the work done. Document approvals, notifications, and data entry are all workflows that are perfect for automation.

It's easy to overlook how much of your day is consumed by menial tasks. Automation shifts the focus, allowing your staff to dedicate their energy to more engaging and strategic activities that drive real value and growth for the business. Business process automation tools boost efficiency across departments and empower employees to contribute at their highest potential.

A document management system provides tools to create custom workflows that automatically route documents for approval, send reminders, and even trigger specific actions based on task status. You virtually eliminate manual follow-ups and maintain consistency in your processes.

The reporting capabilities of a DMS also allow you to analyze processing times, throughput, and other metrics to gain insights into what works and identify potential bottlenecks.

Centralize your team’s communication and collaboration

Using centralized tools solves content sprawl and helps you communicate faster and better rather than constantly switching between platforms. Centralized file storage is pivotal to asynchronous work, assisting teams in finding what they need, working together more efficiently, and avoiding duplicate work.

With a DMS, you’ll integrate workflows and file collaboration within one platform, allowing your teams to share and edit documents in real-time. You can attach pertinent notes and files to their related documents, making it easier to track actions and stay on top of each task.

Built-in audit controls also inform you of every action taken on a document, reducing your audit process from days to hours.

Use document templates

Using standardized document templates helps maintain consistency and avoid duplicating efforts or missing information.

Time is saved when legal teams use pre-approved templates for non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) or when sales departments employ templates for credit card authorization requests and reseller certificates. This ensures you’ll consistently include all necessary details and that your documents comply with company policies.

A DMS like DocuXplorer makes accessing and utilizing templates easy. Your DMS stores your templates, making them accessible to the relevant staff and ensuring everyone works off the latest version. Pairing DocuXplorer with platforms like DocuSign or other digital signature tools lets you seamlessly create, distribute, and store signed documents all within one streamlined workflow. This not only simplifies the process of getting documents approved and executed but also ensures that everything is tracked and stored securely.

Apply AI where it makes sense

AI tools make data extraction, processing, and even decision-making smarter, freeing up your time for more skilled tasks that require human input. AI enhances data accuracy and provides insights that would take much longer to discover manually.

Many modern DMS platforms incorporate AI to enhance document lifecycle management. For instance, intelligent document processing (IDP) is a methodology that uses AI to automatically extract, analyze, and organize data from different sources.

Quick access to relevant information allows your staff to spend time on other work rather than manual data entry and improves decision-making. IDP facilitates better operational flow by indexing and filing documents and automating data entry.

DocuXplorer’s AI Capture finds, extracts, and files documents based on your instructions.

Elevate your day-to-day

A robust document management system can be a crucial enabler in seamlessly implementing productivity strategies.

Solving administrative bottlenecks makes space for growth and innovation. Creating a standard process framework supported by sophisticated tools enables your teams to tackle new challenges while daily work gets done in the background.

Time-saving techniques are more accessible to implement than you might think. A document management system houses your business information and makes routine tasks more efficient with an easy-to-use interface and automated data entry and processing tools. You’ll minimize errors, streamline your workflow collaboration, and improve time-to-value.

DocuXplorer is a comprehensive yet cost-effective and simplified system that helps you achieve business process automation. You won’t have to figure out setup or optimizations on your own—DocuXplorer’s user-focused onboarding, training, and dedicated support give you everything you need to start saving time immediately.

Access our free template to discover what processes are eating up your day.

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