There are 3 areas where reliable document management is crucial for enterprise organizations, regardless of the industry.
Table of Contents
1. Regulatory Compliance
Every business today has to comply with an ever-expanding list of regulations, regardless of the industry they operate in. Which is good thing and is necessary, given the various scandals that have occurred because of an absence of regulatory bodies in the past.
It’s vital then that enterprise organizations have systems in place to ensure that they’re compliant with any of relevant regulations. This is especially true for any company working in the government contracting sector.
If, for instance, you’re part of the manufacturing industry servicing the aerospace and defense sector, and you’ve been contracted by the U.S. government to produce parts needed for a satellite, you’ll need to submit that project’s accounts to the DCAA, the Defense Contract Audit Agency.
Before doing so, you will want to conduct a pre-audit audit in-house, to make sure that all the necessary documentation is in order and is up to date. It’s crucial then that you employ the latest software solution so that you have a reliable system in place to manage and organize all that documentation.
The same thing is true for all industries. If you work in the financial services sector, you need to comply with all the regulations around privacy and security. If you’re in the renewable energy sector, you have to meet all your ESG requirements. And if you’re in biopharma, you have to ensure that everything you do and make complies with FDA criteria, and with any of the other regulatory bodies throughout the rest of the world.
2. Audit Trails
Whichever sector you operate in, you will at some stage embark on a large capital expenditure project, whether that’s for a new factory, warehouse, laboratory, office or retail outlet. What that means is that you’ll be working with various layers of contractors and subcontractors.
When you have multiple, independent companies working on what are frequently multi-year projects, there are inevitably going to be disputes that arise. And the only way to determine those is with whatever audit trail you’re able to produce.
You must therefore have a document management system that is both completely reliable, and is easy to access and navigate. Your software solution needs to automatically time, date and user stamp every action and all the activity on each of your projects, and to then organize them in a logical and coherent way.
Because it’s the quantity of documents that you’re able to produce, and the story that they tell, which will determine the outcome of any disputes that arise.
More importantly, well-organized and up to date documents that are easy to access will help prevent disputes from arising in the first place.
3. Corporate Governance
“Governance frameworks are the bedrock of how an organization is governed (and) it is imperative that governance documentation is accurate and kept up to date.”
–PwC
The third area that depends on document management, particularly for large enterprise organizations, is around corporate governance.
On the one hand, you need to put in place a framework that clearly sets out the ethos and practices that the organization has established to ensure that all laws and corporate regulations are being correctly followed. This framework will reflect the company culture and give guidance for decisions made at board level, managerial levels and throughout the organization.
And on the other hand, you need to make sure that those practices are clearly documented and have been made widely available. So that everyone within the organization knows that the framework exists, and has a clear understanding of what those practices are.
Cora Document Management
Document Management
Cora PPM digitizes all your data and documents and organizes them all through the one, central hub. Everything is kept permanently up to date, in real time, and is immediately accessible.
The Cora apps for iOS and Android enable you to upload images or documents, and log any changes, where and whenever you need to, even when you’re offline.
And because all actions are time, date and user stamped, you automatically have an audit trail for all of the activities throughout the lifecycle of your project. That data is stored and archived in a logical format so that it’s easy to search and retrieve any documents that might be needed.
With the result that it’s very easy to establish who was sent an email, whether they read it and what action was or was not taken subsequently. Because everything produces an automatically generated audit trail.
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