This is How You Implement a Digital Workplace

The Corona pandemic has brought about a structural change in the world of work. Due to mandatory home office regulations, companies had to create digital solutions to enable their employees to work from their own four walls. Maybe this change in your company has not been so noticeable - in that case, you have certainly already taken advantage of the benefits of New Work. This also includes that your workplace is no longer purely a physical place, but you can theoretically work together from any place in the world with your colleagues and complete your tasks.

An important part of this development is your document management (DMS), in order to ensure continuous information exchange even when you are not working at the same location as your colleagues. By consistently providing all important documents, you accelerate processes, find necessary information faster and can implement legal requirements more easily. This largely concerns the documents that you have previously filed in a folder in the office cabinet - customer and supplier files, orders, invoices and contracts.

By switching from analog folders to digital files in document management systems (also called Enterprise Content Management System, short ECM), you enable location-independent access to information. But what exactly is a Digital Workplace and how can you successfully implement it in your company? Let's explain it more clearly in this article.

What is a Digital Workplace?

A Digital Workplace is a fully mobile and digital working environment that allows you to do your work independently of time and place. At the same time, it ensures the continuity of your company's information exchange and knowledge management and can be continuously expanded. The objective here is to combine the business interests of your employers with a modern work culture. But your Digital Workplace involves not just requirements for software used by all employees but also the design and optimization of processes within the company.

A Digital Workplace can include various platforms, tools and collaboration tools depending on your company's requirements, which are essential for your daily work. However, more generally speaking, a digital workplace is always a digital interface where employees can work via mobile devices, save their data and documents and share information.

What are the advantages of a Digital Workplace?

Using a Digital Workplace offers various advantages for you and your company.

• Independent of time and place: Many employees appreciate the flexible design of their working hours and workplace very much, as it contributes to a better work-life balance. Through a digital workplace, you also stay in contact with your colleagues at different workplaces and can design your working day to fit your life.
• Interdepartmental Collaboration: A common platform that all of your colleagues use makes it easier for you to exchange information and documents across departments. You no longer have to wait for another person to pass on a file to you, but can access it in parallel. Such a practice can speed up work flows.
• More efficient work and savings on costs: By using Digital Workplaces, you save paper and time that you would usually spend on manually filing invoices, receipts and other documents. With just one click, you get all the information you need and can optimize your productivity. If you work exclusively digitally, you also send your documents digitally to customers and suppliers. This eliminates the costs of envelopes, postage and paper. You can also archive your documents in a legally compliant manner with just one click, once you have defined the storage period in advance. As a result, you are legally secured and meet legal requirements.
• Increase in transparency: You quickly clear up ambiguities in work procedures through digital collaboration, as you can transparently see who last edited and viewed documents. This enables you to quickly identify the relevant contact persons in case of questions and then dedicate yourself to your tasks again. Automated workflows and reminders as well as fixed processes reduce the processing time and potential for error.
• Improved internal and external communication: Because all documents and information are stored digitally in your DMS, you can make quicker and more detailed statements to your colleagues and customers. This has a positive impact on your business relationships.

How DMS supports you in your Digital Workplace

The right document management forms the basis for a digital workplace and can be expanded with various components. To what extent you wish to use this is subject to your in-house requirements. A Document Management System will support you in office communication, scanning, workflow management, legally compliant archiving and with intelligent search functions. All these processes originate from the heart of the Digital Workplace - the e-file. In this, all information is bundled and linked with the corresponding workflows. The contents can be classified and linked with other documents, so that all colleagues can see how certain processes relate to each other. The special advantages of your digital files are searchability, clarity, security and mobile access. They also enable you to manage large amounts of data, for which you would otherwise probably need several office cabinets, due to their compactness.

With the use of the e-file you enable your colleagues to work securely and structured, regardless of the location. Therefore, they are suitable for use in sales, accounting and customer management as well as in procurement. To do this, all analog documents must be digitized once in advance, which can initially be time-consuming, depending on the scope. However, this investment will pay off during the use of your DMS, as it will considerably reduce the time you need for your work, compared to working with analog documents.

If you want to set up a Digital Workplace in your company, the best way is to proceed as follows:

1. Document the current status
2. Determine the target status
3. Define a goal that you want to achieve with the Digital Workplace
4. Choose a provider
5. Start a testing phase with some colleagues
6. Implement the system
7. Migrate your data
8. Fix the problems from the testing phase
9. Launch the DMS throughout the company

These software can be used to implement a Digital Workplace

On our software assessment platform OMR Reviews you can find suitable tools in the document management category that can help you implement a Digital Workplace. One of the software available is enaio® from OPTIMAL SYSTEMS, which we will now introduce in more detail.

enaio by OPTIMAL SYSTEMS

Over the past 30 years, OPTIMAL SYSTEMS has specialized in the development and distribution of enterprise content management software and targets small, medium, and large businesses. The IT solutions support you in implementing digital workplaces. In addition, with the enterprise management suite enaio® you can efficiently structure, manage transparently and archive your knowledge. The software is modularly structured and based on preconfigured configurations. That saves you time and resources in document management, and you can optimize collaboration in your organization.

You can get even more insights about the software in the following video:

Other DMS-Software-Solutions on OMR Reviews

Besides enaio®, on our platform you can also find ratings and reviews of the following software:

CAYA

Dropbox Business

Bynder

Templafy

Work digitally in a contemporary way

A Digital Workplace is not a trend that will disappear again, but will assert itself in more and more companies due to its exceptional features. It not only offers economic benefits, but also personnel benefits, creates transparency and optimizes your processes. Have courage and take the step into digital work. You will see that besides the right mindset, only the right software is needed to collaborate even better.