Moving to Digital Employee Documents What Are The Benefits?
With organisations facing rapid change in employment legislation and higher workforce mobility, it has become increasingly difficult to effectively manage high volumes of paper based employee documents.
Common problems faced by HR departments in managing paper employee data include:
- high paper storage and administrative costs
- difficulties in monitoring unauthorised document access
- increased vulnerability to audit failure due to difficulties in retrieving all requested documents
Using digital employee documents
Moving to using digital employee documents rather than paper is much easier than many organisations realise. By using document imaging software such as Kofax Capture employee documentation can be converted to digital format quickly and efficiently.
The software also allows HR staff to index these documents with file metadata such as name, department, employee ID number, start date and other criteria used in the management of employee information.
Capture software also allows for a wide range of staff documents to be scanned and indexed including:
- Contracts, appraisal documents, time sheets, absence request slips and other signed forms and documents.
- Paper correspondence and résumés.
- Copies of qualification certificates, work permits, visas, passports.
- Insurance documentation
- Accident books
New the staff documents are in a digital format they can be stored in a networked folder location or ideally in a dedicated document management system.
Dedicated electronic document management systems are designed to enable easy management of all your documents by type. While securely storing your data they also allow for quick and easy location and data retrieval, by searching on the indexed fields or conducting keyword searches within documents.
Benefits of digital documents for HR departments
Systematic scanning and capture of employee documents offers numerous advantages to HR departments:
- Less paper storage – Departments can reclaim office space and reduce the costs of handling and storing paper documents.
- More efficient admin – With rapid document filing and retrieval, HR staff spend less time searching for documents plus documents can be shared quickly and securely online.
- Automation of document-based workflows – Electronically indexed employee documentation can be tracked easily through approvals workflows, and managers gain greater visibility of document-based HR processes with the availability of reporting and dashboards.
- Centralised records management – Document management systems provide a single centralised platform for managing all staff data including scanned documents, emails and other electronic files and can link these records with back end databases and HR software.
Web-based document management systems such as FileStore allow authorised staff to view documents from any web-enabled terminal using standard browser software. - Improved security and compliance – Systematically digitising employee documents improves traceability from receipt to final archive. Features like complete audit trail are inherent to mature document management systems such as FileStore from DCS.
DCS and HR Document Management
For assistance in assessing and finding the right HR document management and scanning solutions that full meet your requirements including industry regulations and legal compliance talk to DCS on +44(0)1753 616720.
DCS are experts in a wide variety of document management and document scanning software, systems and services that will not only improve your productivity and reduce costs, but also keep you on the right side of document compliance requirements - visit Data Capture Solutions at http://www.dcs.co.uk for more information.
Published on 31/05/2013
