Article

Five key considerations when choosing a SaaS document management solution

A unified approach

When it comes to choosing software for document management, most mature education providers recognise the need for a unified approach. An integrated, enterprise approach caters to whole-of-business requirements by linking applications, knowledge and data across your organisation.  

The ability to make decisions based on reliable, consolidated data is more likely to save you time and money, and benefit your staff, academics and students. Although it’s clear you need an ERP software solution, how do you begin to refine your options?  

For the benefits of integration to flow throughout your institution, you need to ensure solutions are compatible with your operational needs, workflows and future plans. Read on for the top five considerations when choosing a SaaS document management solution.

Mobility

Your solution should enable your employees to work remotely by allowing them to access information any time, anywhere and from any device. Improving your team’s ability to access information while off-site can drive organisational efficiency. Instead of spending hours finding the right information, staff have immediate and easy access to all the right information to make informed decisions. Enabling BYOD (bring your own device) can further increase efficiency by reducing desktop support.

Usability

Consumer expectations are driving expectations for universities, and this includes document management. Enabling your staff to easily find, identify and share relevant information not only leads to better decision making, but also improves operational efficiency through reduced manual processing. Look for a solution that stores everything in one centralised place, making it simple for users to find, track and manage documents and information. Your staff need to be able to find relevant content using a simple, intuitive search interface integrated with core business systems to provide a single place to search for any document.

Security

It’s important that your solution supports the security of your enterprise information and student data. A smart solution will have flexible security to ensure appropriate access to a document at any given stage, and restricted document access to protect confidential data.

Compliance

Look for a solution with full transparency and auditing capabilities across the entire system, to adhere to government and industry regulations. Choose a solution with automatic workflows and e-signatures to confirm that all approvals and exception justifications are in place. A key feature should also be the ability to quickly find documents and records to simplify compliance when audits arise.

Scalability

You want to invest in a solution that is highly scalable, enabling you to achieve efficiencies by minimising IT involvement and removing need for maintaining specialised technical skills. SaaS is highly scalable and secure, benefiting from the economies of scale achieved by a single vendor running thousands of instances of their software in the cloud. You can also reduce total cost of ownership by delivering high-value solutions without having to buy and manage the underlying infrastructure.

Software that supports a unified view of document information is often difficult to find when you have complex processes and decisions within your institution.

When integrating people, processes, data and technology across disparate business functions, you must look beyond traditional ‘best-of-breed’ feature checklists. It’s critical to take a big picture, whole-of-enterprise approach when it comes to selecting the right software and technology to support your organisation’s objectives.

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Publish date

14 Mar 2021
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