dms-prozesseA document’s lifecycle is mirrored by the business processes in which it is used. Business processes create, change and delete documents. Documents, on the other hand, trigger business processes and control them. A comprehensive ECM / DMS software follows and supports the complete document lifecycle from its creation to its defined destruction. dms-prozesseDepending on the individual task at hand, it can also be sensible and helpful to support only specific phases of the document lifecycle by specialist software solutions, like e.g.: Input Management / (Bulk) Scanning Expecially interesting when a company needs to capture many paper docuements. Technologies like OCR, ICR or HCR serve to extract the full text and, together with the metadata, affix it to the scanned document. Through these data the documents can be quickly found and retrieved for further processing. Electronic Filing & Archiving All electronic documents are managed here and can be accessed by authorised users. These documents can be of a commercial nature (invoices, shipping notes, contracts, offers etc.) but also technical (construction drawings, bills of material, source code etc.). Special attention is payed to legal regulations, like auditing acceptability. Output Management / (Bulk) Printing Electronically filed or archived documents are being prepared for output respectively sending (letter, e-mail, fax etc.). Thus, information from the DMS can be consolidated into a new document, e.g. for offers, or headers, company address or logo can be inserted. E-Invoicing Incoming and outgoing invoices is a standard process for DMS. The commercial processing is executed via structured data exchange (Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), XML formats or web forms). In addition, the auditing acceptable digital archiving of invoices received is ensured (HGB, AO, GDPdU and GoBS conformity). Contract Management Contract management solutions administrate all contracts and all relevant information, like periods of validity, cancellation dead lines and intervals, reminders etc. at one central point. Often, they already support the compilation of contracts, managing e.g. different versions or internal clearance processes. Whether a company is better served with a fully integrated and comprehensive ECM / DMS software or with specific special solutions is ultimately dependent on the company’s documentation tasks, their frequency and scope, i.e. an individual analysis of the relevant business and document processes is necessary.