Document Lifecycle
About Document Lifecycle
Let’s dive into the fascinating world of document lifecycles and how M-Files handles them.
Businesses’ performance today is driven by data and documents. From email and contracts to analytics reports and project plans, documents support the communication, collaboration and free flow of information that enables businesses to move forward.
As documents and digital information have taken a larger role in business, document lifecycle management has become increasingly important as well. A document lifecycle is the stages that a document goes through from creation and categorization to storage and sharing, to archiving or destruction.
Superior document management software can help companies manage the document lifecycle to extract greater value from documents, increase efficiency and productivity and reduce the cost of managing rapidly growing volumes of data. Your teams can automate pre-defined document management workflows and successfully manage your company's document lifecycle.
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From creation to disposal, see how M-Files provides a smarter way to manage documents, emails, and all your content.
Challenges Of Document Lifecycle Management
Companies seeking to manage a document lifecycle more effectively face a number of critical challenges.
Volume of information
Data volumes in businesses around the world are skyrocketing. To avoid overwhelming workers with data and to minimize the high costs of storing large amounts of information, companies must employ document lifecycle strategies that eliminate redundant, obsolete, trivial or unnecessary data from storage.
Complexity of managing documents
Documents today are created by and stored in a dizzying array of applications, systems and platforms. Simply finding the right document today can consume 30% to 50% of a worker’s day1. To recoup this lost time, companies must employ lifecycle management strategies that make documents easy to find within seconds and that prevent data silos from making documents unavailable.
Manual, error-prone processes
A significant part of any document lifecycle involves collaboration. A variety of workers may be involved in authoring, editing, reviewing, commenting on and approving documents. When handled manually, this process can create significant bottlenecks that jeopardize productivity and create lost opportunities. Solutions that automate workflows can help to ensure that documents are processed accurately and efficiently, and that company guidelines and regulatory requirements are met.
Poor version control
Throughout the document lifecycle, organizations must take great pains to ensure that employees know which document is the latest, most up to date and authoritative version. Version control can be a nightmare when employees resort to emailing attachments back and forth. Effective document lifecycle management must make it easy to control how documents are accessed and edited.
M-Files: a smarter way to manage the lifecycle of information
M-Files uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help companies manage, use, organize and secure documents more effectively. The M-Files intelligent information management platform simplifies document lifecycle management in several key ways.
A single view of documents
M-Files offers a metadata-driven approach to storing and organizing files. Rather than migrating data to a central location, M-Files leaves documents wherever they reside and simply creates connections to them to provide a single, unified view of information throughout the organization. Metadata tags help identify what the document pertains to, who created it, what should happen to it next and other essential information. With a metadata-driven system, workers don’t need to know where a file is stored. They can simply enter what they’re looking for in the M-Files search bar and get connected to the right document in seconds.
Streamlined collaboration
To enable multiple users to co-author, edit, review or approve documents, M-Files creates a single copy of the document and provides a link by which any authorized user can access it. Multiple users can edit or annotate the document simultaneously, and all changes are stored in historical versions that make it easy to roll back to earlier content when needed.
Automated workflows
M-Files automates document-intensive processes with custom workflows that move documents through each phase of the lifecycle accurately and efficiently. Metadata guides each document to the next stage and enables automatic notifications and alerts to individuals when action on a document is required.
Overview of M-Files Platform
M-Files is a document management platform designed to help knowledge workers automate their processes and work more efficiently. It offers a metadata-driven approach to document management, which means documents are organized based on their content and context rather than just their location. Key features include:
- Document Creation and Management: Streamlines the creation, storage, and retrieval of documents.
- Workflow Automation: Automates document-centric workflows, improving process efficiency and accuracy.
- External Collaboration: Facilitates secure sharing and collaboration with external partners.
- Enterprise Search: Provides powerful search capabilities to quickly find relevant documents.
- Security and Compliance: Ensures documents are managed in compliance with regulatory requirements and includes a comprehensive audit trail.
M-Files integrates with existing applications and file systems, making it easier for businesses to adopt and leverage its capabilities.
Fast search and retrieval
With M-Files, workers can find documents within seconds, rather than spending minutes or hours searching for the right information.
Enterprise-grade security
M-Files encrypts documents and uses strict permissions to ensure that authorized users can access information easily while everyone else cannot.
Everything in one place
By connecting to documents no matter where they reside, M-Files breaks down data silos and provides a comprehensive view of documents within the organization. That means workers can easily filter for all documents related to a client or project, all contracts that are up for renewal this month or all correspondence related to a specific case or matter.
Secure client portals
Through Hubshare, part of the M-Files portfolio, companies can establish secure client portals that provide customers, partners, vendors and others outside the organization with access to all the information they need. Hubshare’s portals can be branded and customized to the needs of individual customers. Secure client portals make it easy to share large files securely, helping to reduce the use of shadow IT and unsecured file-sharing services.
Automatic support
M-Files comes with regular, automatic updates, enabling IT staff to focus on supporting the business rather than manually updating a platform.
Automation: the key to document lifecycle management
Efficient document lifecycle management relies on automation, and M-Files offers best-of-breed technology to automate workflows.
Workflow automation in M-Files is based on metadata that specifies the document’s lifecycle and the status of each stage. With this information, M-Files automatically guides each document to the correct workflow stage, updating metadata as each phase is completed.
With M-Files, you can create custom workflows to suit specific needs and assign tasks to colleagues. M-Files will automatically follow up, issue notifications and alerts, and check to make sure that workflows are proceeding at the correct pace. Integration with common eSignature technology allows users to sign documents from anywhere using a mobile phone or tablet, enabling workflows to continue on time.
How M-Files enables efficiency for your business?
Faster Search
What you need, when you need it. That is the way M-Files works. Fast, easy, and intuitive.
Familiarity
You can use your favorite daily tools, such as MS Teams or Salesforce to manage your documents.
Easy Collaboration
Share content securely, and co-author documents simultaneously — wherever you work.
Streamlined Daily Work
Let M-Files suggest tags for your documents and add workflows for faster processing.
How Does It Compare to Other DMS for Managing the Document Lifecycle?
Managing the lifecycle of documents is crucial for business performance. In today’s data-driven landscape, documents play a pivotal role—from emails and contracts to analytics reports and project plans. The document lifecycle encompasses the various stages a document goes through, starting from creation and categorization, all the way to storage, sharing, and eventually archiving or destruction.
With the M-Files platform, knowledge workers can find information faster, work smarter, and achieve more. M-Files features an innovative metadata-driven architecture, embedded workflow engine, and advanced artificial intelligence. This enables customers to eliminate information chaos, improve process efficiency, and automate security and compliance.
M-Files stands out in the document management space due to its unique metadata-driven approach, which organizes documents based on their content and context rather than just their location.
- Deep integration with Microsoft Office and other Microsoft products, robust collaboration features, and extensive customization options.
- Excellent for managing PDFs, strong e-signature capabilities, and seamless integration with Adobe Creative Cloud.
- Strong workflow automation, good integration with various business applications, and user-friendly interface.
- Affordable, easy to use, and good for small businesses.
See M-Files In Action
Seeing is believing. Schedule a demo to learn more about simplified search, automatic workflows, intuitive user interfaces, and built-in integrations with existing applications and file systems.
