Latest News
Documents are the bloodstream of your business
Blood doesn't just sit in your body - it moves, it’s pushed around carrying oxygen and nutrients to wherever they're needed, constantly. When circulation to one part of the body is restricted, that part suffers, even while everything else looks perfectly healthy from the outside.
OK so that might be a poor analogy, but documents work the same way in a business. An invoice, a delivery note, a quality certificate, a signed contract - each one carries information that some other part of the business needs to function. When that flow is restricted, when a document sits in an inbox, a desk drawer, or a folder nobody else knows exists then the department waiting on it is starved of what it needs, even while the rest of the business appears to be running fine.
Most businesses might not think of documents this way, they may just consider them as things to file once, after the fact and then forget about them. That mindset is exactly why so many businesses end up with the visibility gaps I covered my previous article. If you want your organisation to become connected, then this is the layer to fix first - because almost everything else in a business (and in this series) builds on top of it.
What document management means.
Strip away the jargon, the acronyms and the over-inflated descriptives and there are five things a proper document management approach needs to get right:
Capture- How does a document enter the system in the first place? Ideally, automatically - an invoice arriving by email is captured directly, a paper delivery note is scanned at the point it arrives, and the key data (supplier, amount, PO number, date) is read straight off the document rather than typed in by hand.
- Indexing
- A captured document isn't useful until its data is extracted and it’s tagged with the information that lets you find it and link it to other records for example the job number, the supplier, the invoice number, the employee, or the batch. Indexing is what turns "a file in a folder" into a record your business can use.
- Retrieval
- With proper indexing, finding a document takes seconds. Search by any of those tags or index fields or even search the full text of the document itself. No opening forty nested folders, no guessing whether the version you want is called "invoice_final" or "invoice_final_v2_USE_THIS_ONE."
- Version control
- When a document changes, for example a revised quote, an updated contract, an amended drawing well, you need to know what changed, when, and by whom, with the previous version still available rather than silently overwritten.
- Retention
- Not every document should live forever, and some are legally required to be kept for a set period and then properly disposed of. Retention rules that apply themselves automatically depending on the type of document remove a job nobody remembers to do manually.
What this looks like with real manufacturing paperwork
A supplier invoice arrives by email. Instead of landing in someone's inbox to be printed out and/or manually forwarded and re-keyed, it's captured automatically, the key fields are read straight off it (OCR), and it's then indexed and checked for maths errors then verified against the right purchase order and routed for approval, all with no rekeying, no risk of it getting buried.
A delivery note and certificate of conformity arrive with a batch of raw material. They're scanned in at goods-in and indexed immediately against the specific job or batch number so six months later, when a customer or an auditor asks for full traceability, the answer is a search, not an archaeology project through a filing cabinet.
An employment contract or a health & safety permit-to-work sits securely indexed against the right employee or job record, visible to the people who need it and genuinely inaccessible to everyone else, which matters as much for GDPR as it does for good practice.
Why folders and shared drives fall short
Most business are running on some version of a shared drive, and it's worth being honest about why that stops working as the business grows. A folder structure has no audit trail - there's no real readily-available record of who opened, edited or moved a file. It has no real search beyond the filename someone happened to choose and it gives no meaningful control over who can see what, once someone has access to the drive, they typically have access to everything on it from routine delivery notes to payroll data.
None of this is a criticism of how businesses have grown. A shared drive is a completely reasonable starting point. It's simply not built to be the tissue layer a genuinely connected company needs - that's a different job, requiring a different kind of tool.
Where a purpose-built platform earns its place
This is exactly the layer that DocuWare is built for. Documents are captured automatically from a range of sources such as email, scanners and mobile devices, with intelligent document processing (IDP) that reads and extracts the relevant data rather than requiring it to be typed in by hand. Every document is instantly retrievable through full-text and indexed search, access is controlled down to the individual document type with RBAC and every action for example who viewed it, who edited it, and who approved it is logged automatically, giving you the audit trail that manual filing simply can't.
It doesn't replace your ERP, your accounting system, or your CRM but sits alongside them as the layer that makes sure the right document reaches the right person, indexed correctly, every time - which is precisely what the next stage of this series builds on.
Where we go next
Capturing and organising documents properly is the foundation but, a TRULY connected company needs more than well-organised documents sitting still. It needs them moving across the business au, triggering the next step in a process without anyone having to push them along manually. That's workflow automation, and it's where we're headed in the next article.
Book your tickets now for our "The Connected Company" event at the Aura Centre in Hessle and, if you want to discuss the challenges you face, drop me an email: shaun@anota.co.uk.
Shaun Turner - Technical Director
