Intelligent Online Document Management for Cellular Retailers

Enhance communication
The centralization of all important business documents permits users, throughout the organization, to access real-time information from anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, by using any web browser. This paperless distribution eliminates the risk of losing important documents and allows authorized users to have immediate access to vital information.

While online document storage is a key benefit, an online document management solution must also provide collaboration, group sharing, and document editing features. Regardless of whether they are at home, the office, or one of their retail stores, authorized users have access to all of the company's data to make any necessary modifications. Users can easily track changes, as well as receive e-mail notifications when files are updated, added, or removed.

Online document management can increase the availability and accuracy of information made available to employees. Multi-location retailers, especially, can create a centralized library of information for employees to peruse, avoiding the hassle of maintaining an updated employee e-mail distribution list or the worry that employees will not receive the important notices. Product and service information, employee forms, and sales goals can be provided online to keep distribution costs down while simply making it easier to keep employees better informed.

Improve data organization
A recent study found that workers spend an estimated 20% of their day looking for information in hardcopy documents, yet about 50% of that time they are unable to find what they are looking for.¹

No matter what the original document format, with online document management cellular retailers can quickly search for and retrieve information based on a wide range of attributes, eliminating the valuable time wasted searching for information when it is needed. Online document management, in essence, creates a "virtual file cabinet" for your company that provides secure, organized, and fully-searchable access to all important business documents.

By creating folders in the system, cellular retailers can group information and documents logically based on the original document type, the contents of the document, or any other criteria that they so choose. Permission and notification settings can be assigned to each file or folder, ensuring that only authorized users have access to the information, and that each specified user receives proper notification if the contents change.

Increase security
Researchers estimate that before the end of 2009, over a third of all small-to-medium businesses will adopt a hosted web-based application solution of some kind.² This helps to illustrate that businesses are becoming more confident in the security measures incorporated with web-based applications.

With the right measures in place, unauthorized users will never access vital business data without permission. By utilizing advanced security protocols and encryption, including the use of Secure-Sockets Layer (SSL) accelerators, online document management can offer a much higher level of security than most retailers could ever provide on their own.

While customizable levels of password-protection security are mandatory, it is insufficient to merely restrict or grant access to certain users; measures should be in place to track who accessed information and any changes made by the user.

A study revealed that security issues are the main reason for e-mail service problems, and that attacks on these communication lines are having increasingly devastating effects on businesses.³ By e-mailing documents that contain sensitive intellectual property, customer details, and transaction histories, many cellular retailers leave themselves wide open to security risks. Also, consider how difficult, if not virtually impossible, it is to enforce security measures across an organization consisting of Master Agents, Subdealers, employees, and contractors located over several locations.

Online document management addresses this issue of security risks associated with e-mailing important company information. By centralizing your document storage and distribution, users create, by default, not only a standardized solution regardless of the agent or location but also security and process protocols to follow for the storage, organization, and distribution of the paperwork. Instead of insecurely e-mailing documents, a secure document link can be sent so that only authorized users can access the appropriate information.

Compared with locally installed solutions, online document management essentially helps to mitigate risk by providing automatic data backups and innate disaster recovery. Data backup and security responsibilities are left to professionals whose business it is to provide the highest levels of security protection. In addition, since the hosted servers are not "on-site", local power outages or other catastrophic events will not threaten to compromise the cellular retailer's important data.