Construction is not only a capital intensive industry, it’s also document intensive. Various versions of engineering drawings, contract documents, agreements (with customers, suppliers and sub-contractors), legal documents, pre-qualification documents, correspondence (with client engineers, between various partners etc) are vital business documents.
Besides, there are standard documents of taxation, legal, power-of-attorney, bank guarantees, court cases, board meeting minutes, employee documents etc. Managing paper work of this scale is indeed a herculean task.
Following are some of the common challenges in this regard:
1. The filing system is individual driven. The way client correspondence is filed at project ‘A’ may be completely different than the way it is filed at project ‘B’ since they are handled by different persons. In the same project itself, if the person managing the document changes, then the filing system undergoes a change. You must have experienced a nightmare when you wanted to search a particular old document!
2.
Some documents may be required to be referred even after 10-15 years. For example, construction contracts and correspondence with the client engineer is required to be referred even 10 years after the project completion, during the claim settlement. The search becomes challenging since by then the person filing the document might have left the organisation or might be handling a different assignment. Inability to produce the document on time may even lead to financial loss.
3. Change history tracking is another challenge for documents like contracts, engineering drawings etc.
4. At times, documents are needed instantaneously. Non availability of the concerned person may lead to chaos at that point of time. Suppose on the last day of filing tender, some documents are needed within an hour and imagine if the concerned person is on leave that day.
5. Overall, the time required to search a document is unproductive. When human resource has become premium, this waste needs to be avoided.
6. Over the years, old documents get stored in the not-so-well-maintained area/s and are bound to get damaged.
7. Documents consume significant amount of storage space, which is at a hefty premium especially in cities.
Digital storage of documents provides answer to these challenges. Document Management Software (DMS) are meant to file documents electronically. You can create your own electronic filing system, very similar to the physical filing system. Only difference will be that this system can be created as standard across organisation instead of having person dependant filing system. Also these files will remain at a central place (i.e. data-centre computer storage) instead of being in the drudgery of physical untraceable storage space.
For storing in the DMS, documents may be in the form of scanned copies of paper documents, word / excel/ PowerPoint / AutoCAD files or any other format of computer files. The files can have nomenclature; one can have a well maintained index within the files. While storing a document, you may give a few keywords that get stored along with the file, so that the document can be searched through those key-words. A document can also be searched on the basis of the words appearing in the text of the document. All this provides ease of storage as well as retrieval. Retrieval can be much faster compared to the one in case of physically stored documents.
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