Document Management Process & Workflow with the Digital Thread: Four Steps

Imagine you work in production at a chocolate manufacturer and must set up your equipment to roast cacao beans for a new dark chocolate recipe. However, when you check the document that should contain the roasting settings for that recipe, the information is nowhere to be found. Searching through inboxes, sifting through irrelevant data, and contacting colleagues to find the right information could eat up the rest of your day, throwing off production timelines. That’s why, at scale, this kind of hiccup can make a major difference to business success.

This is just one example of the importance of document management, the set of practices and tools used to track and organize an organization’s documents, and the data contained within them.

No matter the industry, almost all business operations today rely on documents that often contain mission-critical or sensitive information. Yet many organizations struggle to enact proper management processes. More worrying still, the lack of document management systems (DMS) hurts business performance. Forrester research has found that 97% of organizations with minimal or no document management capabilities see a dent in their productivity during major workflow disruptions, compared to just 18% of organizations with advanced DMSs.

The proper traceability, classification, handling, accessibility, management, and storage of information in DMS can help businesses gain an advantage over competitors with documented and scalable processes. Follow these four steps to establish the essential components of effective document management workflows.

1. Formalize the document creation process

Document management doesn’t just create efficiency: it captures vital information that can be used to inform business strategy. However, to make this data useful, it must be recorded during the creation phase, the beginning of the document lifecycle. From product specifications, product drawings, and manufacturing instructions to user manuals and maintenance procedures, a well-structured and clear document creation process ensures that all salient information is accurately and consistently gathered.

When modeling a document creation workflow, consider the classes of documents that the business will likely need and what information its end user will need when referencing them later. Establishing formats or templates for different purposes helps ensure that the information gathered contains all relevant information but no unnecessary information.

In your codified document creation process, include the capture of metadata or information about a file and its contents. Metadata could include the class of the document, type of data contained, its intended users, tags for related topics, or even basic information like the date it was created. Establishing a routine for metadata collection will enable the team to search for and find documents more easily. Document management with a modern PLM platform like Aras Innovator provides robust support for rich document metadata most of which is generated automatically.

Finally, have a clear strategy for how traceability of these newly created digital documents fits in your overall digital thread strategy.

2. Chose a document management system

Effective document creation process connects the document to the digital thread — but the security and utility of these documents rely on the access and permission model of the DMS platform.

First, determine how the organization will transform from paper to digital documents. This is key because without that transformation documents can’t be managed by DMS. While paper continues to be necessary in certain sectors, a paper copy can always be generated from the digital documents which offer security advantages, productivity gains, and easy accessibility and sharing.

Are you having trouble letting go of paper? Consider one study of data breaches reported in the American healthcare industry between 2010 and 2019: Researchers found that protected health information stored on physical paper or film was more susceptible to attacks than any single digital document.

In comparison, modern DMS platforms align more closely with the goals of most modern businesses, offering benefits like on-demand access, detailed permission settings, seamless collaboration, and SaaS scalability. Use the organization’s document management priorities and policies as a guide when choosing the right DMS platform. Always consider a cloud-based SaaS platform instead of on-premise servers because of scalability, ease of access anywhere and at any time, and lower cost of ownership. On-premise servers are always an option, but come with the cost of maintaining it yourself.

Finally, don’t forget about the importance of relating digital documents to other digital artifacts in a digital thread. This means that a modern DMS system should not be an island, but part of an enterprise-wide digital thread platform capable of relating “anything to anything.”

3. Codify retrieval and collaboration processes

Work can be completed faster when information is easy to locate, as complex or slow retrieval processes can limit employee productivity and autonomy. Think back to our chocolate manufacturing example: if the machine settings had been maintained as a digital document in a DMS platform, which in turn was related to the specific receipt, was traceable via digital thread, and was tagged with relevant metadata, it could have saved that manufacturer a lot of time and productivity.

Many work processes benefit from collaboration on relevant documents to further boost productivity, especially in geographically dispersed teams. Most modern document management systems include tools to facilitate this collaboration, including version control, comments, and real-time simultaneous editing. In addition, best-of-breed systems enable faster reviews and approvals for critical data, allowing creators to loop in stakeholders and ensure accuracy and regulatory compliance.

4. Deactivate obsolete documents

When documents are no longer needed, they’ve reached the end of their lifecycle: obsolescence. It’s time to use the DMS to remove users’ access to the document, preventing its information from being mishandled or cluttering up the system. In some cases, regulatory compliance will require this obsolescence to follow a certain process.

Start by establishing a document retention and obsolescence policy: a formal strategy that dictates which documents are considered active and which are not. Determine when you should expect to sunset different types of documents. Then, codify these rules to make them actionable across the organization. In modern DMS platforms, users can input their requirements for obsolescence, enabling automation features to assist with or handle these tasks.

Today, we are creating documents that we need and nothing else. Those days with excessive documents that pollute the system are gone. – Eli Tuber, IT process manager, Carestream Health

How Aras Innovator supports modern document management

Document management helps organizations connect business-critical information to essential processes. Aras Innovator® provides essential services like version control, secure access management, integration with leading work tools, collaboration, and flexible automation at each stage in the document management workflow. In addition, it allows digital documents to be connected to other product items via its digital thread.

For many of today’s businesses, though, information is collected throughout the product lifecycle. If managed separately, these documents and data can become siloed and underused. Aras Innovator provides a path for organizations to overhaul their document management strategy by connecting the full product record along the digital thread.

Building the digital thread enables organizations to tap into deeper insights and safely manage product lifecycle information. Learn more about the power of the digital thread and Aras Innovator in our e-book, Four Steps to Break Away from Data Isolation.