Whitepapers

The cloud is an excellent place for companies to improve the drawing distribution and collaboration of documents. Though some resistance to fully integrated, cloud-based storage still remains, a system controlled by secure document management software can reduce the risks, enabling businesses to share and track files with confidence and ease.

As small to medium-sized businesses expand, their information base also increases. With expansion comes the growing need for greater information security, faster workflows and improved productivity. This is where a document management system can help.

Moving to a cloud document management solution is not a straight-forward decision; there are benefits and disadvantages. We look at the current state of engineering document management software and how to think through the process of moving to the cloud.

Technical workflows need to incorporate information and input from other areas of the organization that are part of the product life cycle.

Document management systems provide many benefits to organizations, but perhaps the most important in today’s world of exploding data is the improvement in file security. IT departments are looking for better ways to safe keep important files, especially with increasing mobile access. Security is paramount in today’s world of information sharing and distribution and mobile device access; how to secure corporate files depends on how they are being used and by whom.

As companies grow, their ability to utilize and pay for more sophisticated and integrated systems grow. For product development and manufacture there are many software products to assist organizations in becoming more productive, more accurate, more responsive, and more secure. Like an enterprise ERP system, there is a time and place in the company’s evolution to purchase and install specific systems like a PLM solution. Often a starter, or "lite" PLM is the right choice.

CAD files are proprietary files with complex relationships that make managing files much more difficult, but a document management system that can manage these files can save on expensive CAD licenses.

Version control is neither a new concept nor new software functionality. The explosion in content of all types, including email, text, and web communications, however, is putting more importance on this standard capability, while new technologies are assisting users in keeping the right number of versions for the optimum amount of time.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has made its way into EDMS and BIM software. RPA automates repetitive tasks for improvements in productivity and collaboration. 

A document management system provides significant benefits in document organization, security, search, version control, view and more. Once users find documents, they perform the work they do with those documents, often in traditional ways established over many years by their organizations.