Many people working in large companies feel frustrated by how poorly information is managed and how difficult it is to find the right information. When the right information is hard to find or missing, it affects both the well-being and profitability of your business.
Poorly implemented tools and unclear procedures for creating, storing and finding information make your employees feel inefficient, stressed and irritated. Job satisfaction and well-being among your employees decreases. It also increases the risk of losing information, making wrong decisions and dissatisfying your customers.
What can you do to avoid this?
A good start is to minimize the use of email when managing documents, and instead focus on editing and reading documents directly on storage areas or in shared forums. Emailing causes problems with a lot of different local versions of the same document. In addition, email traffic is often unencrypted and copies of sent documents are created on local disks and phones. A document management system has great advantages in that several people can edit a document at the same time and all changes are fully traceable. Compare emailing around a document with adjustments in the management team with everyone in the management team changing simultaneously in the same document with full traceability.
Categorizing and structuring makes it easier to save and find the documents. The only question is how to structure the documents - by customer, subject, author or perhaps year? The answer is YES! How can you solve this in a good way? By using modern document management systems, you get a lot of benefits in the form of simultaneous editing, version management, backup, tagging, searching and secure sharing that you do not have in a regular file system.
Many people do not think about the fact that the company has gained a very powerful document management system when the company has introduced Teams or Google Docs. Unfortunately, most people only experience that they are forced to move their files from the file server and the desktop. In Teams, you can easily create several parallel structures in the form of views where the documents that match the selected view are displayed. The same document can magically appear in the customer view, the product view and the personal view by tagging the document with customer, product and author. Choosing how to structure the documents, how to tag them and which views to create can be difficult. Here, concept and information modeling can be good tools for developing document structures and appropriate tags and views in a workshop format. We know that effective document management is often difficult to get started with in an organization where people are used to emailing and saving files on the desktop. It needs to be clear what the benefits are for everyone in learning the new way of working.
In our experience, it is necessary to set aside time to get started. It is much easier to get help to get a kick-start in the work instead of spending lots of hours with trial-and-error.
The same document can magically appear in the customer view, the product view and the personal view by tagging the document with customer, product and author.
The next step is to review the information in your different systems and set up guidelines for where different types of information should be created and stored. This applies to current data as well as to older historical data or data that is archived. Start by checking whether the same information is stored with different values in the different systems, e.g. does the customer's address or the stock status of products differ between different systems? Then it's worth cleaning it up and considering integrations that automatically update data between systems. When several of your systems regularly handle the same information - e.g. customer, product or employees, it is a good idea to integrate the systems and determine which system should be the "master", i.e. the source where you make changes and ensure that other systems are provided with updates when, for example, a customer is added, changed or removed. In connection with the system changes and data cleaning, it is necessary to appoint people who are responsible for each area of information and continuously ensure that the data is correct and train users in the value of data quality.
When several systems regularly handle the same information - e.g. customers, products or employees - it is a good idea to integrate the systems and determine which system should be the "master", i.e. the source where changes are made and ensure that the other systems are provided with updates when, for example, a customer's address changes.
It is easiest and cheapest to check data directly as it is entered. Training, plausibility checks and predefined lists catch many mistakes. Clear instructions make it easier and safer to work. Remove fields that are not used and avoid free text fields as much as possible. It should be easy to get it right. Justifying why a certain type of data is important and for whom it is important increases understanding and thus data quality. When the right data is created in the early stages of the processes, it builds stronger trust in the information stored in your systems. You will then have the confidence to use the information, make decisions based on the data from the systems, and measure and monitor your operations successfully. When everyone has the same information, you will have better team dynamics and easier decision-making when there is confidence that data is accurate.
When everyone in the company understands what to do and why it is important that everyone works in the same way, both well-being and profitability in the company increase. We are experts in structuring information and are passionate about seeing how companies thrive when all employees handle information with confidence and trust.
Contact us if you want to know how we can help your company!
