Imagine the plight of a late army officer’s widow who is told she cannot receive her husband’s pension just because she cannot remember the Pension Payment Order number (PPO).  Her husband’s regiment number was of no use since PPO was the only searchable field in the Controller General of Defence Accounts (CGDA) pension department. Can the officials be blamed for ‘babuism’? Not in this case. With over 20 crore documents in the system, it was practically impossible to manually search the payment release order in the absence of a key search field.

Fortunately for this person, CGDA was undergoing a huge transformation. The department was about to get all of its 20 crore physical documents digitized. Looking at the fact that there was no other way to find the pension file of the martyr, the officials consulted the document management implementation team to check if their pilot system could be of any help. 

Samir Dhingra, Partner, Netspider India (the software company implementing the DMS project), says, “We tried searching the records using our system and came across 20,000 entries against the late army officer’s name. We were able to retrieve the exact file after adding the regiment number along with the name. We were able to see the real benefits of our project even before it went live.”

While this case involves a government department, think of a situation where your CEO asks for a document and you are unable to retrieve it for hours. Perhaps you might have to search for another job instead of the document. While digitization might appear to be the sole motivation towards deploying a DMS, workflow efficiency and compliance are bigger drivers and any progressive enterprise would do well to adopt DMS sooner rather than later.
However, there are many factors you should consider if you are serious about making your DMS a successful deployment.