Document Search: How to Find Business Content Faster

How are you supposed to do any sort of document search when critical information isn’t organized?

As budgets and resources shrink, it’s common to feel overwhelmed when facing a list of critical projects with tight deadlines. Maybe you Googled “productivity tricks at work” to help you alleviate this mounting pressure only to find roughly 4,630,000 results – none of which provided the magic bullet you needed. That’s because you realized most of your time is spent on document search.

Why exactly is it taking you forever to find the documents you need?

While companies are burdened by complicated business systems and processes that hamper operations, many are forced to make the best of what they have. The result? You often spend quite a bit of your day seeking out the information you need to complete a task. When document search is difficult, resources like time and knowledge are wasted. Interdepartmental cohesiveness disappears.

Your over-complicated processes prevent your organization from:

• Optimizing resources
• Allowing employees to tackle critical tasks that directly benefit the company
• Engaging employees
• Identifying and addressing critical weaknesses to achieve company goals
• Delighting customers

The good news – this common and critical issue can be fixed

Eliminate silos of information and optimize document search by importing business content into a centralized system to ensure transparency, streamline communications and ultimately manage performance. This system of collected and consolidated data will then become the keystone of your core business processes.

With the proper tools, information within documents can be automatically tagged. Content that’s been indexed with metadata provides a system that supports a property-based search process. This allows users to find their documents quickly by entering properties like document type, date, employee name, vendor, etc. The optimal document search solution should also be able to support full-text search with the capability to find PDFs.

All of this provides structure to your information and makes finding that specific document better within your storage system.

The best part? Once content is tagged, the metadata can automatically trigger workflows which can be sent to another team to process. Within these workflows, document search can be conducted at any time to gauge progress and bottlenecks. Collecting metadata can pave the way for streamlining your entire document process.

How automation and integration can assist in document search

While automating business processes can lead to an efficiency boon, it can also become a bother. When business systems can’t “communicate” with each other, it means employees are forced to continuously shift between disparate sources of information.  And, if data has to be manually re-entered, that can affect the time it takes for a document search as well.

A centralized place to onboard content combined with a system that can inherit already-built taxonomy is the best solution to overcoming a bad user experience and low productivity.

A user-friendly platform allows users to:

• Track business content across platforms, easing document search
• Hook into other systems to automatically or assist in tagging content
• Route documents to other repositories your organization uses, including Microsoft SharePoint, SharePoint Online, Box, Egnyte, Google Drive, AODocs, FTP locations, and file shares so users don’t have to worry about where the document should be stored
• Eliminate complex mapping and ongoing maintenance
• Perform database look-ups and validation
• Ensure proper governance by enabling an enhanced document search, regardless of destination

Stop stressing out and search better.

There are three key points to keeping your organization organized: simplifying processes, improving information organization with collected metadata, and deploying a user-friendly platform. By incorporating all three components, you’re able to optimize your document search to find information faster.