Recently I helped one of our manufacturing clients improve their new product setup process. Prior to using CNG they created a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and emailed it around the office for input from the various departments. After doing that and getting it back to the originator, data was rekeyed into their MRP(Materials Resource Planning) system. Obviously this could be quite error prone as data was rekeyed and had the possibility of being overwritten. They contacted us about helping streamline the process by possibly using CNG-Forms to capture the data and having it be transferred from the resulting SQL database to their MRP database. After evaluating the data in the spreadsheet and trying out a CNG-Form it was determined this was not a satisfactory solution due to the nature of the data(the quantity of data was variable per product setup). Instead we helped the client redo the Excel spreadsheet and then added a small amount of software as a macro which exported the data from the spreadsheet to the MRP system. This spreadsheet was setup as a document template, a workflow rule was created to route it around the office as required. The last step was to send the spreadsheet to the MRP person who uses the macro to export the data to the MRP system.

This is a great example of using standard office tools to create a customized workflow and have the data exported to another software system. The process to do this was not overly technical, but it did require sitting down with the client and working through how their system worked.

CNG-SuperSearch

CNG released a new search component for our document repository at our user’s conference last September. This component has been a big hit with our users.  It’s called CNG-SuperSearch and it can be either a gadget (Windows 7 or Vista) or it can be a small desktop application (Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7). The goal of this component was to allow users of CNG-SAFE the ability to find documents quickly and efficiently without having to fire up the CNG-SAFE client. From one small screen it gives you the ability to do full text, keyword, and metadata searching across all of the repositories and cabinets available to you.

Document Management – Saas vs Internal Deployment

If your company is considering investing in electronic document management software (EDMS), you may feel a little overwhelmed by all the options available. Not only do you need to find the best product to meet your functional and budgetary requirements, but you also probably need to find the product that best fits with your IT infrastructure. Traditionally, document management software is purchased and then installed and implemented on a company’s servers and workstations. In recent years, a few document management companies have begun to offer hosted (Software as a Service – SaaS) document management software where your documents reside on a server external to your facility and you access the system via the internet

There are 5 key areas you should consider before selecting what type of solution to deploy in your organization.

Financial – what are the short-term and long term costs associated with the two approaches?  In simplest terms, internal solutions require a bigger upfront investment while SaaS costs are typically spread out over time with monthly payments. Of course the SaaS costs may seem like they would be much higher than internal costs over time, but considerations must be made for IT time spent maintaining the server and providing backups. These costs can be incremental if your IT department is already maintaining a group of servers, or they may be major if you aren’t setup to handle the ongoing maintenance.

Deployment – what are the steps taken to get the systems up and running for your business? One of the bigger advantages for SaaS is the ability to get the software up and running very quickly, as opposed to a longer path for internal deployments, particularly if new hardware is needed.

Integration – what are the capabilities (or maybe limitations) of SaaS vs. Internal? It is important that you think about how you want your document management system to integrate with other applications that you use in your business today. In general, it is easier to integrate software programs that are deployed on the same network, so the internal approach gives you some advantages if you are looking for strong integration with software that you already have running internally.

Security – are there security differences between the two approaches? There are security differences between the two approaches. If your documents are stored on a local server, then it’s a relatively simple matter to secure access to the server and limit the ability of people to do things to the server. However if you don’t have a good IT person in charge of your security there is the potential for security breaches. If you adopt a SaaS solution you are basically entrusting your provider to ensure the security of their solution is adequate to protect your data. This should be an important consideration in your selection criteria. On the vendor’s side, it’s in their best interests to provide a secure solution as they would be out of business rather quickly if they do not approach this in a professional manner.

IT Philosophy – does your company embrace internal solutions or are you going “virtual”? For some companies this is an easy decision. Either they have all internal software or everything is in the cloud. For these companies the decision is simple and they just have to find the vendor who best meets their needs. For other companies that use a mix of SaaS and internal systems, the decision is more complicated and may depend entirely on the feature set of the available products and how they match the needs of the organization

Jon Clark has written a whitepaper providing more detail on this subject:
http://www.cabinetng.com/white-papers/internal_v_hosted.php

When can I shred my paper?

After the implementation of an Electronic Document Management System (EDMS), a logical thought generally comes to mind. Can I get rid of my original paper documents and if so when? After all, one of the benefits of using an EDMS is to ‘get rid’ of the paper. The answer is ‘It depends’.

Historical and current paper based business documents must be digitally captured to be used with an electronic document management system (EDMS). Once captured, the question becomes what do I do with the paper. Several options exist from destroying the document to retaining the paper. But, is there a hard and fast rule that can be always used? The answer lies in the type of document and industry specific regulation. There are typically three categories of document retention that I have experienced. First the original paper must be kept, second you can keep the paper if you want but is not required, and third is no paper needed.

The following points should be considered when making a decision on whether to keep or shred documents after they reside in the EDMS.

1. Is the document(s) regulated by any agency? If so, what is the agency policy on electronic documentation?
2. Can scanned documents serve as my ‘legal’ original? The most frequent answer is yes as long as it is your policy that the electronic document is the original and both electronic and paper are not maintained. Typically if both are maintained, the paper document serves as the default original.
3. Are there any regulations that require documents with signatures to be maintained in original form?  If so, can I keep just the signature page on file and scan the remainder of the document? This answer typically comes from the regulating agency or legal counsel.
4. Ensure that a reliable backup of the electronic documents is completed before destroying the paper copy. Make multiple copies of the backup. One advantage to electronic documents is that you can have more than one copy available. With paper, you typically have one and only one copy.  A whitepaper on backups/disaster recovery may be found at: http://www.cabinetng.com/white-papers/disaster_recovery.php
5. Ensure privacy of sensitive documents by shredding before disposing.

When to shred documents that are stored in an EDMS is dependent primarily on two criteria. Are the documents regulated and if so, what is the regulating agencies policy , and, what is my company policy on keeping paper. Once you have a shredding procedure defined, make sure you have a minimum of one good data backup before getting rid of the paper.

Abe Niedzwiecki has written a white paper on this subject:
http://www.cabinetng.com/white-papers/when_to_shred.php

Meeting Compliance Requirements With Document Management Software

“If you think compliance is expensive, try noncompliance.”
Former Deputy US Attorney General Paul McNulty

Compliance is of primary concern to financial service, healthcare, and government organizations. Meeting compliance regulations have historically been perceived as an onerous burden. Today, leading companies are taking a broader approach to meeting compliance and are even embracing the benefits compliance offers. Meeting compliance must be a systemic process that touches all aspects of an organization. Compliance is generally achieved by meeting three requirements: managing documents, enforcing security/disaster recovery, and auditing activities.

Managing documents
Organizations rely on various technologies to help meet compliance requirements. Of these technologies, managing documents is the most prevalent.  To remain in compliance, any organization must demonstrate its ability to know the absolute whereabouts of all documents at any given moment. Accomplishing this in a paper-based environment is no longer practical. The best way to organize, track and control documents is to place them into a document repository. This foundation that creates numerous advantages for the organization. First of all, the whereabouts of a document is always known by the system. Anyone with proper authority can quickly locate any document with as little as one piece of information about the document. A good document management system will give the user a number of methods for locating a document including: structural search (mimicking the physical filing aspects of a cabinet, folder, tab structure), Metadata search (file attributes such as name, size, data type, age, etc.), or full text search (locating words within the document’s body). This gives the user the flexibility to use the right tool based on what they know about a document. Having a full arsenal of search options impresses auditors and can shorten the time spent on the audit process. Another common requirement with most compliance regulations is the ability to control the lifecycle of a document. Retention determines how long a document must be in the system before it can be deleted. Retention periods are defined based on what the document is and the industry in which it is being used.  Edit rights are used to control whether a document can or cannot be edited. In most cases both the retention and edit rights are put in place the moment the document enters the system. Setting these attributes can also be automated so they are set without user assistance. This can come in handy in demonstrating how the organization’s policies are being consistently enforced during a compliance audit.

Enforcing security / disaster recovery
Enforcing security and providing for disaster recovery are chief compliance criteria regardless of industry. Securing documents in a document management system needs to be accomplished in a way that enables users to be productive the moment they log into the system, yet prevent them from ever accessing restricted information.  Enforceable rights should include:

Folder Rights	Document Rights
None	None
Preview	Preview
View	View
Edit	Edit
Create	Create
Delete	Delete
Lock	Lock
Export (indexes / contents)	Export
Transfer (move / copy)

No document management system should ever be implemented without a sound back-up/disaster recovery plan. Fortunately the DMS simplifies back-up and recovery dramatically because all documents and system information are centrally located in the repository.  Some compliance requirements also mandate periodic system recovery testing to verify the recovery plan is working. Required or not, disaster recovery testing is just good policy, much like replacing the batteries in a smoke detector once a year.

Auditing activities
There are two components for having a successful audit. First, all activity needs to be captured in a transaction audit log. Second, the capability to filter the log data needs to be available so it can be presented in a useful manner. Every action performed by a user is added to the audit log with a date/timestamp. This gives administrative personnel the ability to generate a report based on a range of items.  Administrative generated reports can be very simple reports of a specific activity or complex queries covering multiple criteria.  Beyond satisfying the compliance aspects of audit, auditing activities can be a powerful tool when it comes to identifying events that are too time consuming and in need of improvement.

Complementing the audit functions are search and trace functions. Search is used daily by end users of the DMS to locate specific information. Trace is a simple function that allows the user to review the workflow history of an entire folder or individual document. Trace is especially helpful in demonstrating that a workflow process is following the organization’s documented policies. Just like Audit reports, Trace reports can be immediately previewed on the monitor or saved in a variety of file formats for data reorganization and reporting.

Compliance requirements will often require an organization to produce a complete set of documentation that clearly defines various policies and procedures. During an audit, these policies and procedures must be demonstrated as being readily available and followed. Storing policies and procedures in the EDMS is the best way to make sure they are readily available for reference and review. Version control can be used to keep documentation up to date while maintaining a historical account of all modifications. Creating specific workflows based on policies and procedures also ensures everything remains in order and is properly documented. Workflow policies can also be applied to ensure all policies are periodically reviewed by required personnel.

Forms Integration and Data Reporting

There are few things more irritating to a business owner than having employees spend time filling out forms and not being able to capture the data entered and put it to use elsewhere. A form is still a good way to capture data as it’s a process understood by a large percentage of the population (i.e. – who hasn’t filled in a form at a doctor’s office). The goal of an integrated electronic forms system is to reduce the amount of data input by preprocessing the form and capturing the entered data in a database. By performing these two functions, data entry time is saved; the gathered data is more accurate, and stored in a format that provides easy reporting. When integrated with an electronic document management system (EDMS), an electronic forms package becomes even more valuable.

An integrated EDMS and forms package can provide a company with a vast array of options for making data more accessible and more usable by other packages. For instance with CNG-Forms, the forms are built as a document template. This document template can then be connected to a table in the CNG database. Fields in the document template can be prefilled by data from the CNG-SAFE database. This minimizes the amount of data which has to be filled in by the user. This makes your data entry more efficient and minimizes data entry errors by using the same data over and over. As each form is saved, a new record is written to the database table saving the data from each field on the form to a field in the table. The form can then be put into an automatic workflow for approval.

After the data is stored in the data table attached to the form it can now be accessed through any number of other software applications replacing data entry in those applications or providing an extended reporting capability.

The key benefits to this type of solution are:

• A permanent record of a transaction (the form)
• The data in the form fields can be added to a database table
• Electronic workflow allows the form to follow either a rules-driven process or ad-hoc routing
• The data in the database table can be extracted, manipulated and/or reported on
• Simple to use

A whitepaper is available that discusses this subject in more detail:
http://www.cabinetng.com/white-papers/forms_integration.php

Finding a particular document

One of the major advantages using an electronic document management system (EDMS) is retrieving a document quickly when it’s needed. Doing this efficiently depends a great deal on how the EDMS stores documents in its repository and how they are categorized. Most systems have one or more of the following ways to retrieve documents:

• structural search
• keyword and/or metadata search
• full text search

Structural search is used to find documents in a very structured environment. If you think of a doctor’s office or a financial advisor, they have a folder for each patient/client and all the documents for that patient/client are in the folder. To find a particular document, open the folder and scan the list of documents and find the one you need. There are several things that can be done to speed up the scan, such as categorizing the documents (Correspondence, Progress Notes, …). Doing this with an EDMS is much faster than burning a path to a physical filing cabinet. In general, this type of search is valuable when you know exactly what you are looking for. Structural search is highly dependent on the Graphical User Interface (GUI) used by the EDMS. A good GUI is intuitive and requires little or no training to search for and retrieve documents. If a user can visualize the filing structure and navigate to specific documents with minimum clicks and data entry, the GUI is probably most responsible.

An EDMS allows users to index documents with keywords. Those keywords can be entered later in a search field and a list of documents associated with a keyword or set of keywords will be presented. The more keywords associated with a document, the more specific the searches that can be performed. The fewer keywords, the more likely you would receive a longer list of documents returned by the search. This type of search is useful for finding all documents with specific key words. Something like “July vacation request”, would return a list of all July vacation requests (hopefully). This type of search is dependent on getting the keywords input correctly on the front end, but can be quite powerful when looking for specific document types.

Full Text Search (FTS) is yet another way to search for a document. FTS involves looking for a document based on a word or phrase that may be contained within the document. For example, if a clerk wants to find all prescriptions for “XYZ Drug”, they could type that into the search and get a list of all documents that contain “XYZ Drug”. FTS first and foremost requires that documents contain text. An EDMS that provides full text search indexes the text contained in all the documents within a database. Depending on the size of the document repository, the FTS database can become fairly large. As documents are filed and indexed, they become searchable using the EDMS FTS feature. This is a straightforward process for documents like emails, MS Word®, MS Excel® and other text-based documents. However, scanned documents do not contain text (a scanned document is an image) so they must be converted to a format that contains text and is searchable.

Both keyword searches and full text searches are very useful for finding lists of documents containing a particular phrase.  The disadvantage to both of these is the search can possibly return long lists of documents. In addition, if the full text search is searching documents created with OCR, there may be issues with finding the text as OCR is not being 100% effective.

As you may have already concluded, no one search method is ideal for every business and every application. As with most things, there are compromises to be considered. For example, going with the easiest way to get files into an EDMS might mean it will take a little longer to retrieve. Careful, detailed indexing of every document may make it easier to find later, but there is a cost associated with this approach due to more time spent up-front filing documents. The best solution is to have the ability to run any of the discussed searches depending on the business process and the most efficient overall approach.

Jon Clark has written a more detailed white paper on this subject:
http://www.cabinetng.com/white-papers/document_search_methodologies.php

Batch Scanning – Turning Paper into Digital Documents

The need to quickly and efficiently organize, index, and file paper based documents in an Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) can be challenging. By implementing and properly configuring available software tools, this task can be managed effectively. Batch scanning is the commonly referred to process of turning paper into digital documents.  The use of batch scanning in the proper manner can increase productivity and ensure success in the implementation of the EDMS. Software packages that help with batch scanning are categorized as document capture software(a subset of the overall ECM market).

Batch scanning typically falls into two basic categories; manual batch processing and automated batch processing.  The two categories have different criteria and definition.

There are 5 steps involved in the capture process:

1. Document preparation – involves the preparation of the physical documents to be scanned by the capture solution. Depending on the state of the documents, preparation can be a time intensive task.
2. Scanning – involves the capture of the physical documents by a scanner. Scanner selection is key  step in getting this part of the job right.
3. Quality Assurance – the process of ensuring the documents scanned are of high enough quality and that all the data necessary is available.
4. Indexing or Classification – the processing of indexing the documents so they are filed in the correct place in the document management system. With an automated system they will likely be filed based on some piece of data extracted from the document (either via OCR or a barcode). With a manual system, a person would have to view the document and file it in the correct location.
5. Migration – the final step is having the document capture software file the documents in a document management solution.

The batch scanning and document capture process is very useful in processing many documents rapidly. It is important to review the document types, decide on the best scanning hardware and software to use for the capture process, and employ the most effective manual and automated data entry schemes.  By implementing these techniques, a few hundred to thousands of pages of paper can be processed by a single scan station on a daily basis.  It is critical to choose a knowledgeable consultant to guide you if you have large volumes of physical documents to import. Abe Niedzwiecki has written a more detailed white paper:
http://www.cabinetng.com/white-papers/batch_scanning.php

How do I get my paper documents scanned quickly and efficiently?

This is perhaps the number one question our professional services team gets when they are asked to consult on how to scan all of the old paper documents offices collect over time (frequently years). Companies have historical and current paper based business documents that must be digitally captured to be used with document management software. During the capture process, the documents must be labeled with index information so they can be easily located once stored. Various document types may require different scanning parameters and index information depending on the type of document and how the document will be searched in the electronic archive. Scanning thousands and perhaps millions of pages of paper requires a well thought out efficient capture solution.

There are five functions to be performed to get the old documents scanned efficiently:

1. Document preparation – prep old documents for scanning, determine document types, etc.
2. Scanning – determine volume of documents, how to scan, what to scan with, etc.
3. Quality Assurance – verifying the documents are scanned correctly.
4. Indexing or Classification – index the documents, automatically with OCR or barcode separation, manually by looking at each document, separate based on document types.
5. Migration to the document management solution – after scanning and indexing the documents are moved to a document management solution.

The keys to deploying a successful scanning solution begin with the planning stages. Understanding the document types to be scanned, hardware requirements, indexing methods available, and realistic timeframes to convert paper to digital images are all vital considerations. Without reviewing the physical documents and understanding the level of effort required to prepare the documents, the results may be disappointing. With careful planning and trial runs of the entire process, reasonable expectations can be set and met. Remember, if you need help, there are professionals available to assist you with the entire process.

Abe Niedzwiecki has written a white paper on this subject:
http://www.cabinetng.com/white-papers/document_imaging-where_to_begin.php

Challenging Economic Times

Paper document managment systems are simply inefficient. There is no way around it. With the economy the way it is today, companies have to “do more with less”. Part of this is making your business more efficient by using basic technology. Document Management is one of those core products that can make a huge difference in how your business operates. It’s a product that is no longer just to be used by the Fortune 500. It’s very affordable for even the smallest businesses.

If you aren’t using a document management system today, spend an hour learning about them and how they can help you. It will be well worth your time. Here’s a link to an earlier post about measuring the Return on Investment for a document management system.

Here are ten interesting facts about documents and how they cost you time/money. Just consider a couple of these in combination.  If 7.5 % of all documents are lost then not only do you have to spend $220 each to recreate them, but you have to spend $20 to file them again.

I personally don’t see how a business will survive these days without being as efficient as possible.