Within highly regulated industries and those individual businesses with a strong need to meet strict compliance standards, maintaining document control helps organizations to avoid risk that can have a lasting negative impact—whether that comes in the form of fines and lawsuits or a tarnished reputation that is difficult to overcome.
Document control involves the methodical and secure management of documents throughout their lifecycle, encompassing their creation, accessibility, modification, distribution, and disposal.
Effective document control is fundamental for enterprises as it not only fosters organizational efficiency, but also safeguards document integrity, ensuring alignment with regulatory standards throughout the entire corporate landscape. Implementing a robust document control system empowers businesses to track document origins, alterations, distributions, and disposals, thereby mitigating any uncertainties regarding prudent document management.
By instituting the appropriate controls, businesses can enhance the quality and reliability of their documentation. A comprehensive document control system seamlessly streamlines these critical functions, bolstering enterprise-wide document management.
Implementing a Document Control System
A document control system is the tool that manages document control—which can include set rules and the software facilitating them that you integrate into your workflow.
A system built to facilitate document control should be able to efficiently manage, organize, share, and secure your documents. The right system can take it one step further by fully automating time-consuming processes driven by documents. Instead of having to handle the tedious work of ensuring that the right person has access to the right documents at the right time, your system can route files to those that need them.
DMS: Your Top-of-the-Line Document Control System
A document management system (DMS) is one of the most popular and effective ways organizations manage document control. A DMS can effectively manage documents and document processes—no matter how complex. Whether you’re looking for a way to store your documents in a centralized location, or ready to start on your journey of complex automated workflows that involves document routing and requests for approvals, DMS can do it all.
Professionals across highly regulated industries such as healthcare or accounting that generate extensive paperwork and complex processes have a significant need for DMS. But the adoption of DMS in any industry can be useful in streamlining all aspects of document control.
The Impact of Document Control
A DMS that drives document control can help businesses store, organize, and manage the entire lifecycle of their documents.
How can a DMS effectively facilitate document control? To start, a DMS can start with the basic task of storing documents securely, improving findability and distribution, and routing documents to the appropriate user or location. Users can use DMS to perform key functions of document control.
Securely Storing Documents
- Upload directly from local storage to secure cloud storage
- Orchestrate automated email integrations for seamless and immediate access
- Upload scanned documents, filed in the chosen location
In addition to storage and automated filing, advanced searchability and distribution features allows users to locate file locations in an instant, using a few keywords.
Searchability and Distribution
- Locate any document based on keywords or metadata such as dates, users, etc.
- Share files with internal and external teams through a secure portal that guarantees documents are protected
Business Integrity Through Document Control
Highly regulated industries—from Professional Services, Healthcare, Insurance, to HR departments within every business—need to demonstrate proper compliance with industry regulations through meticulous record keeping, reporting, and documentation. Without implementing document control through the use of a DMS, the integrity of adhering to regulations is significantly more challenging.
Document control with DMS aims to support businesses in meeting such requirements—even in the strictest of industries.
Document control not only increases business integrity, but can provide a number of other benefits such as:
- Increases productivity
- Improves collaboration
- Facilitates organization
- Enhances compliance
- Provides access control
- Improves document security
- Provides traceability
- Enhances quality and performance
While document control is key for managing and protecting your documents, its impact goes far beyond that. Adequate document control can significantly increase the quality of work that your business produces and completely transform the way your business functions.
Key Document Control Features for Compliance
When looking for a system that will empower you to have full control of your documents, you need to prioritize certain features. These key document control features will make all aspects of managing your documents and ensuring compliance more achievable.
Automated Workflows
Automation within document control helps you ensure that every document undergoes the proper processes with consistent and secure document routing. Whichever complex document process you have across your business can be automated with document management.
Every document will go to where it needs to be, without getting held up with slow manual processes. This ensures that documents can be automatically filed into the folder structures that meet industry-wide compliance requirements.
Audit Trails
Audit trails give you the ability to recognize who has performed a given action towards your documents. They allow you to keep track of each user’s access and activity throughout the entire system, logging everything a person searches, opens, modifies, or deletes.
These audit trails help you prepare for upcoming audits and give you documented proof of how your organization’s information is used, making audit trails a key piece of your ability to maintain compliance.
Collaboration
Documents are rarely worked on in isolation. A system built to facilitate document control gives multiple users access to the same document, equipped with collaboration tools, without sacrificing security.
Teams should be able to efficiently share documents internally and externally, while working on documents simultaneously. Unsafe methods of sharing documents put your organization at risk and reduce adherence to compliance standards, solidifying the need for robust document control.
Searchability
To get the most out of your document work, your team’s time and effort should go to analysis and strategic planning, not locating the document. Your document control solution should come with advanced search features to retrieve a document instantly.
Providing your team with a platform where they can locate a document instantly without sacrificing security will help you stay on the path towards compliance.
Review/Approval
Approval of documents via email, which then are signed in a different platform disrupt productivity, and often require follow up from multiple parties. When using a DMS to facilitate document control, one-click reviews and approvals can streamline all document processes, so they can easily move on to the next step within the workflow.
Additionally, reviews and approvals often require signatures. A system with an integrated eSignature can easily move your documents along the workflow, so document work bottlenecks can be significantly reduced.
Access Management
Access and visibility are considerable compliance features only DMS provide. Even without access to a document in commonly used cloud-drives, restricted users can still see a document exists, and may even know who the owner is. Full access to your business’s documents should only be granted as needed. Role-based permissions and customizable access are key to maintaining document control. Access control can involve limiting certain users from viewing, downloading, editing, and sharing documents. More importantly, entire folders can be hidden to ensure company-wide security and compliance via access management.
Integrations
Leaning into a program that offers an open API and integrations with popular programs will help you expand your system’s functionality. An integration with Office 265, for example, can promote collaborative accessibility in a secure and compliant environment as your team co-edits business files.
There are a number of integrations that can transform your business and its document control capabilities, so you should seek out a system equipped with an open API. These integrations are key to implementing full document control in a way that’s relevant to your organization and adapts to its unique needs.
Document Control and Automation
Document control solutions with automation capabilities enable you to automate most aspects of document control. Automated workflows can save you time, standardize your processes, and help you avoid human error.
DMS can automate document creation, tracking, storage, and security. Your documents will always go to the right place while automatically inheriting the security measures that protect confidential data and help you maintain compliance.
For example, when you have a document that needs a signature from a team member, your DMS can automatically route it to them. It will notify them of the required action that they’re responsible for and give them access without sacrificing security. The document will then be stored in its original secure location, complete with the electronic signature.
No matter what steps a document must go through to complete an essential process, using robust document control measures will ensure that your confidential data is protected the entire time.
Your Document Control Solution: Revver
While there are many platforms on the market to help you manage document control, Revver is an all-encompassing document management tool that can facilitate security, storage, automation, organization, indexing, and access management. Revver has all the key features that a DMS needs to make document control a breeze.
Using Revver will help minimize costs, improve collaboration, and enhance overall work productivity and performance. If you’re ready to take your processes to the next level, discover Revver.
