Document Control

What is Document Control?

Document Control is the management of documents to a much higher degree of reliability for security, version, visibility, availability and, most importantly, with a controlled reliable audit trail.

Reasons to turn to document management solutions

More and more industries are falling under the influence of legislation that requires specific procedures for record keeping. Financial services companies need to be able to prove that information is unaltered to comply with the Financial Services Authority; medical practices have to prove that their records are safe from prying eyes to comply with the Department of Health. The legal industry also has specific requirements related to discovery, including full-text searching of massive amounts of documents.

For businesses in these more regulated industries, document management solutions are by far the best way to ensure compliance with strict security and record-keeping rules. It’s important to note that such systems only help your company become compliant, they don’t guarantee it. But, the right procedures and behaviours do. No matter how secure your electronic records are, if an employee prints sensitive information and takes it to lunch, you’re not in compliance.

Document management solutions are used in a broad spectrum of businesses. Human resources and accounting departments, traditional heavy users of paper files, are huge beneficiaries of document management.

ISO 9000/9001 certification efforts can also benefit from document management. Manufacturing and government are two sectors that pursue document management solutions for these broader regulatory reasons.

Any organization that wants to put more processes in place can benefit as well. Document management solutions are used to enforce naming conventions, ensure strict approval processes are followed, and generally add consistency to existing procedures.