The M-Files Blog

Extracting More from ERP

Oil & gas engineers link ERP system to M-Files DMS for airtight information flow

When Nanco Eelman and Richard Keijser started Dutch Separation Engineering (DSE) Oil & Gas a little over a year ago, one of the first steps was to purchase an ERP system.  They knew that an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application was important for managing the planning and financial details of the separation engineering and power quality engineering projects but they knew they needed something more.  

"We're a young company.  Both my partner and I come from larger companies with large data systems.  We know from our past experience that we needed a bit more control than the ERP alone," says Eelman.  "For example, it was very difficult for us to keep track of documents and their version numbers when you just store everything in project folders on a hard drive.  If you were looking for specific documents a year later because you now have a similar project, finding them was sometimes difficult and inefficient.  It was also very hard to determine the status of the documents found -- where exactly in the revision process a drawing or contract document was."

Ideally, DSE wanted version tracking for AutoCAD, ePlan (for electric schematics), Word, and Excel files.  And they also wanted to attach basic metadata to every document they produced for fast file searching.  Metadata would include not only a project number, but a basic set of descriptive attributes, like client name and contact information, document type, dates, revision status, and so on.

Attaching ERP data to Windows files through database links

The solution came with the addition of M-Files document management software, which offers a simple and flexible database-driven platform.  M-Files attaches metadata to documents created with any Windows application and integrates directly into the operating system's Windows Explorer and common Open... and Save As... interfaces.

"With the help of the people from Host Access Solutions, the M-Files distributor in The Netherlands, we have been able to directly link M-Files to our ERP application," says Eelman.

"Every new item in M-Files is associated with a project number generated in the ERP system.  The linkage automatically supplies new projects and contact information from the ERP to the M-Files database.  When saving any type of document through M-Files, employees simply choose the project number from a drop down list, and the rest of the descriptive search terms populate from the database.

 "All the documents we work on -- every single item -- is securely stored in M-Files," says Eelman.  Even incoming email or hard copies from clients are indexed digitally.   "If we get an invoice from a vendor, we scan it into the system, and M-Files automatically includes the vendor info in the associated metadata and processes the invoice according a customized workflow."

Creating self-populating templates

DSE went even further to create templates that display the project attributes in the page header on many common documents in several different applications, like Word, Excel, or AutoCAD. 

"M-Files-driven templates save us an enormous amount of time.  For example, we generate a project completion file with all our final work.  Previously, we had to open all the documents, open all the headers, change the headers, and save the documents.  M-Files can update the headers automatically, so what would have taken us half a day before, we can now do in M-Files in half an hour."

"It all comes down to a major time saver.  A formalized workflow structure, quick document searches, and automatic templates all keep our projects moving forward," says Eelman.  "We are actually ahead of our customers.  We will get something from our client and we tell them, ‘no actually, that's not the right version. We already received this other one.'" 

"We're ecstatic about the new system," Eelman says.  "All our employees -- not just the partners who chose it and set it up -- have picked up M-Files very quickly and they're happy using it as well."

 

About DSE Oil and Gas

Dutch Separation Engineering Oil and Gas brings together a team of experienced engineers, fully qualified to undertake all aspects of system integration, and project management, onshore and offshore.  Operating globally, DSE also offers Power Quality core analysis for oil and gas installations through the revolutionary DSE EPAQ system view (www.dse-epaq.com), as well as oil and gas installation equipment sales, rental, and service.  For more company information, please visit: www.dseog.com.

 

 

Web Series, Part Five: Measuring the Cost Savings of Document Management Software

How much does paper filing cost a staff of ten? 

[This month's series looks into the hidden costs of maintaining paper files compared to an all-digital document management system.  If your small business or department employs ten office workers, how much do physical folders cost you annually?  The amount may surprise you.  See the full series for all the costs.]

In this series, we investigated the costs of storage, labor, supplies, and errors that typically incur when you file paper records.   What's our grand total annually for a department staff of ten?

Total cost of paper filing for a ten-person office.............................$56,980 

Like we said, it's surprising. 

With a simple application costing about 1/10^th this amount (estimate based on 10 employees), your office can save a whole lot of space, time, and money.  

How much does digital document management cost a staff of ten?

Software has its own set of costs as well, beyond the software itself.  There's often labor required to install, to customize templates and workflow, and to train employees, not to mention ongoing IT maintenance.  The genius behind M-Files document management software lies in its simplicity, which makes these costs -just as surprisingly -- small. 

For example, it does not take a long transition to begin digitally indexing new documents throughout the office. Fläkt Woods, a machinery designer and manufacturer, installed the M-Files system on its server over the weekend, gave a short training lecture to its staff on Monday, and the department was up and running saving and retrieving documents to and from the M-Files vault.

What about customization of the software for your actual business processes?  That's a huge undertaking, right?  M-Files user Peter Uhlman of real estate developer the Percheron Group used the software to create sophisticated database-field templates for all his legal contracts.  The software was so simple, he managed to use summer interns to do most of the legwork for his template setup. 

"M-Files is an out of the box solution," Uhlman says.  "We probably invested fewer than 100 hours in the initial implementation.  That was having meetings to set up the vault structure, to understand on how we wanted to store things, and so on.  In the grand scheme of things, that's not a lot of time."

With startup this simple, a document management system for electronic filing can become a reality at your office for still less than one-tenth your yearly budget that's devoted to paper files. And a DMS is largely a one-time expense, not a recurring cost like paper files.  Use the DMS just two years, and your small office just saved well over $100,000.* 

And best of all, it costs you nothing to try out M-Files and see if it works for you.  Find out more about the M-Files Express free trial offer.

*Don't just rely on our analysis. A recent story on a doctor using M-Files reported the actual savings per year on par with this estimate.

Web Series, Part Four: Measuring the Cost Savings of Document Management Software

How much does paper filing cost a staff of ten? 

[This month's series looks into the hidden costs of maintaining paper files compared to an all-digital document management system.  If your small business or department employs ten office workers, how much do physical folders cost you annually?  The amount may surprise you.  See the full series for all the costs.]

The labor cost cited in our last post was just for getting up and finding a file folder.  But what happens if it's not there?  It takes much longer than five minutes to hunt for a misplaced document. 

This obviously happens even with digital files saved in Windows without an effective document management system in place.  Employees sometimes can't remember what an old file was named or where it was saved.

Misfiling

PricewaterhouseCoopers crunched the numbers and discovered it costs $120 to search for every misplaced file and $220 to wholly re-create a lost document.

With M-Files document management software, features like keyword indexing, automatic version tracking, and daily backup virtually eliminate the occurrence of misplaced documents.

In our hypothetical ten-person staff, maybe three items get misfiled per month, and let's say once per month, our staff has to re-do something which it did before but just can't find any place. 

These are conservative guesses.   You might have mishaps like these every week.  For example, if you have older files warehoused in another location, you might take a similar hit each time you need to fetch a document from years past.

Total costs of misfiling............................................................... $7680

Web Series, Part Three: Measuring the Cost Savings of Document Management Software

How much does paper filing cost a staff of ten? 

[This month's series looks into the hidden costs of maintaining paper files compared to an all-digital document management system.  If your small business or department employs ten office workers, how much do physical folders cost you annually?  The amount may surprise you.  See the full series for all the costs.]

So far in our cost analysis of manila-folder-style filing, annual expenses include office space ($4200) and paper and printing ($5600).  That's a considerable chunk of change right there for a small staff, but these sums together do not even surpass the biggest office expense involved with paper files.

Walking to the file cabinet?

On the face of it, walking to the file cabinet seems insignificant, but if you add up the inefficiencies of using paper files, you find an enormous drag on productivity.

If it takes five minutes for a $20/hour employee to get up from a desk, find the appropriate file cabinet, and locate the folder he or she needs - and does this maybe five times a day - then that's over 100 hours per year spent filing. 

By contrast, a company-wide electronic document management system brings up the desired document instantly.

If you double the five minutes to put each file back in its proper place, then it's about $4000 in wages per person, per year.   If you have a staff of ten employees, the cost is roughly $40,000. 

That's one employee's worth of salary devoted -- literally -- to shuffling paper.

Total costs of routine labor......................................$40,000

Web Series, Part Two: Measuring the Cost Savings of Document Management Software

How much does paper filing cost a staff of ten? 

[This month's series looks into the hidden costs of maintaining paper files compared to an all-digital document management system.  If your small business or department employs ten office workers, how much do physical folders cost you annually?  The amount may surprise you.  See the full series for all the costs.]

In our last post, we calculated that the cost of paper files just in terms of office square footage is $4200 annually.  Maybe space isn't such an issue where you work. Still not convinced document management software saves money?  Add the costs of printing all your records:  

Paper, et cetera

If you're in the habit of keeping hard copy documents on file, this means a lot of printing, a lot of photocopying, and a lot of A6. 

The average U.S. white-collar worker consumes 10,000 sheets per year.  That's 2 cases per employee, running about $40 a case.  By the end of the year, your office of ten eats up $800 worth of blank paper.

The expense that really raises the office manager's blood pressure is not paper, but everything related to it:  ink and toner, printer and copier repair.  According to studies, the printing, copying, binding, and other handling works out to almost six times the cost of paper itself.  

Implementing an electronic document management system doesn't mean you'll never print or copy anything again, but a comprehensive digital archive means these costs of paper stock, printing, and copying will be substantially less.

Total cost of paper and accoutrements............................................$5600

Web Series, Part One: Measuring the Cost Savings of Document Management Software

 

How much does paper filing cost a staff of ten? 

It may seem like sticking to the traditional manila-filing methods would be a wise exercise in penny-pinching in these lean times, especially compared to downloading and implementing a new document management application.  

In reality, the annual costs of maintaining a paper system are deceptively high. In this series of posts, let's assume your small business or department has ten employees.  How much does it cost to keep a folder system of paper records?

Office and Storage Space

Current estimates show that even today 50-70% of space in offices is devoted to storing paper records.  The footprint of an average cabinet takes up 15.7 square feet (don't forget to account for the space needed to open the drawer). The average office rent in the U.S. is $15-$20 per square foot annually.  On the low end, you spend $236 per year per cabinet just for the real estate. 

By the way, another metric used in space planning is that you need at least 100-150 square feet per employee.  Eliminate six large cabinets and you have room for one more workstation.

What about the files from four years ago? Likely, they're warehoused in the building's basement or at some distant U-haul locker.  It's reasonable to assume a small storage unit is at least $100 per month, or $1200 annually.

With ten cabinets worth of space, one storage locker, and perhaps one new file cabinet per year ($250) and a batch of those cardboard boxes with lids ($40), your estimated budget for storage for an office of ten rounds out about $4200.

Total cost of office and storage space....................................................$4200

Escaping the Windows Hierarchy

Fully integrated M-Files document manager introduces a better logic for storing business documents

Windows inherited a folder>subfolder>file structure from its former life as DOS, and at the time, it seemed pretty close to how business' stored physical files in cabinets for the last few centuries.  

The problem with the folder tree in Windows is that it actually works against the purpose of keeping files in good order.  And the idea is sort of primitive -- it misses the whole point of computing power.  With the existence of relational databases, you don't really need a hierarchy of folders and you don't need to remember and click through a five- or six-subfolder file path to get the document you need.

In Windows you have to choose the major basis for sorting files first even though your business might change dramatically in the future, and even though different users who share the content might each want to organize it in different ways.

The Windows scheme has other nasty hindrances:  people in the organization can make new subfolders that duplicate file organization and versions elsewhere; they can save document to the wrong file path, accidently drag a file to a random location, or name a file too vaguely for others to decipher.  Who hasn't found files on the server called "presentation.ppt" or "letter.doc"? 

Although Windows folders give structure, there is no meaningful discipline built into the system to keep files organized, and the result sooner or later is usually chaos.  It is a structure you must take time to navigate, but whose logic over time makes less and less practical sense.

M-Files document management software lets you escape the limitations of hierarchical folders.  M-Files' new logic for storing and accessing files is driven by metadata -- descriptive properties for high-speed, precise searches -- rather than file paths.

The software allows different employees to place the same company files in different categories, depending on what's most convenient or efficient at a given time, using a feature called dynamic views.  The file management also enables document handling and search capabilities that far exceed those found in the Windows operating system. 

See this earlier entry for M-Files user Peter Uhlman's casual but colorful explanation of the power of dynamic views and searches.

M-Files Under the Hood: Connecting to MS Outlook

A document management system delivers maximum value when it is comprehensive and encompasses all files in an organization, and that includes e-mail messages and attachments.   M-Files document management software contains features that make it very easy to quickly import emails, attachments or both.  M-Files enables email saving in Outlook with a simple right-click menu.

You can also configure M-Files to automatically save incoming and outgoing correspondence in the document vault.  Once saved in the vault, emails and attachments can be classified with appropriate key terms and metadata, just like any other document or object type.

You can set up M-Files to save the entire complex of message and attachments in the native Outlook message (*.msg) format, such that when it is opened from the vault it opens natively in Outlook, just as if it was opened directly from your Inbox.  It’s also possible to save attachments separately as their own document type or class.  Opening an .msg file launches it in Outlook, while the native files will open in their source application.  M-Files allows you to store emails similarly in MHT format or export the message content as simple text files.

Find out more about email and attachment options in the M-Files User’s Guide.  Try it now with your own emails -- you can now download a fully functional free trial of M-Files document management software.

Document Management Consulting from Motive Systems

Find yourself in a digital file handling quandary?  The best in IT help is a phone call away

One consistent response from users of M-Files document management system for Windows is the simplicity of its implementation.  New users can easily import existing server files or set up custom metadata properties and document types without having to be an IT guru.

But sometimes it pays to have some expert help.  Some users of M-Files often want to integrate a complex set of large IT systems or concentrate on all the nuances of one particular workflow.  Motive Systems, developer of M-Files, has experts on staff that can suggest the best plan of action to nearly any document management situation.  See how Motive Systems can best help you.

M-Files Under the Hood: Setting Up a Workflow

M-Files electronic document management software provides a powerful workflow capability for managing common business processes and handling all documents involved.  M-Files also sends automated notifications to stakeholders who must take action when a process reaches a certain state.

Workflows are amazingly easy to set up inside M-Files and can provide you with a bird's-eye view to monitor work progress throughout your organization.

You can put as many steps as you need to in your workflow, but let's look at a single-step workflow as an example. Say your company manager needs to review and approve engineering drawings before submittal.  In M-Files, key terms or metadata have probably already been assigned to categorize the file for searches. Usually these key terms consist of familiar descriptive information like project number, client name, and document type, in this case "drawing."  Creating a workflow simply means adding an extra key-term field which indicates the state in the workflow.  You can easily set this requirement for all new documents saved under the "drawing" document class.

 For the single step process (in other words, one with two states) drawings can either be 1) listed for review or  2) be approved. 

 

You can add new states as you want as your workflow design evolves.  In this box, you could add another state option -- "mailed to client" -- for example.

Office efficiency improves dramatically when employees don't have to wonder what work has been completed.  Managers can perform a search query looking for all drawings awaiting approval and instantly find an accurate list of outstanding review documents from employees across the company.

Find out more about the M-Files Workflow Feature in the PDF M-Files User's Guide. 

Try out workflow and all the other document control features free, with M-Files Express.