Document Management

Document Management -

Organizing the DocumentsAs your business creates more and more documents, you face the document management issue of organizing these in a meaningful manner. Without organization, it would be impossible to retrieve any document later. Or at best, it would be extremely costly to sort through all the documents and find the one you want.Documents could be organized under departments, by topic and subtopic, alphabetically, regionally, by date, by person and so on. Typically, documents are organized using a combination of these criteria. Thus you might organize sales orders by region, product line, sales office, sales person and date.

The exact scheme of organization would depend on the type of documents. While we saw how sales orders might be organized, the scheme could be quite different for drawings. These might be organized by customer, project, project component, date created and other relevant criteria. Employee documents could be classified by office, department, job category, employee grade and employee ID & name.Ensuring Adherence to Document Classification PoliciesAs documents proliferate, the task of allocating each document to a particular class and subclass would inevitably have to be delegated to staff persons. It would then become necessary to ensure that everybody followed the practices prescribed in the policies.

This would require that the document organization policies are clearly described and written down in document management manuals. Concerned staff persons would then have to be trained in using the manual for deciding how to classify each document they handle.Physical Aids to Document OrganizationBefore computers came into the picture, organizing documents correctly was an error-prone and monotonous task. Inventors were regularly coming up with devices to facilitate this task. There were rolodexes, segmented folders, pigeonhole cupboards and other equipment that few of the present generation might even be aware of.