EDMS: What is a documentary record?

Project management in the engineering sector: developments and challenges.

Like the vast majority of business lines, the engineering sector faces new challenges related mainly to cost optimization. In fact, tough competition, global problems, rising commodity prices, restrictive regulations, etc., are new challenges that must be addressed.

Engineering companies adapt to these new issues:

They understand that to maintain profitable margins they have to search around the world and accept international contracts that involve several international teams, subcontractors and, sometimes, that they work together with global competitors.

Work methods must evolve to better adapt new projects and processes.

New skills must be acquired and new products and services must be developed for new markets, such as renewable energy.

Principles of electronic data management: document, file or documentary information.

The documentary record is one of the central elements to fully understand what an Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) is. One of the objectives of an Edms is to organize documentary material. Therefore, it is essential to be able to archive information in "smart" trees adapted to the company.

However, depending on the type of EDMS, there will be different options and ways to manage the files. In a couple of lines, I will give you an idea of how the documentary material should be managed. We will stick to the base and we will not talk about the software of invoices of materials and the management of the configuration.

EDMS and documentary materials.

The structured access to documents through commercial information, which are not necessary in the document of identity of the documents stored in families of documentary objects, is allowed thanks to the documentary materials. Therefore, the documentary materials could be compared with the folder, the folder, the envelope, etc., used to collect documents.

In addition, we can also draw the parallel with a Windows tree. However, the main difference is that in our case we can integrate the same document in different folders without copying it. In fact, folders use links to document and do not really contain them. This "multiple positioning" feature is significant and does not exist in paper format.

It is useful to be able to find all the files in which a document is classified. Among other things, it facilitates the impact analysis linked to the modification of the document. Each EDMS must have a "work case" feature that allows this type of search. Also, keep in mind that the folder itself can contain other classification folders that are then classified into subfolders.

Consequently, the documentary file can go from a simple "folder" grouping different documents to an actual multi-level document tree composed of subfolders (which can be, as documents, integrated in different folders).

This is a good basis to begin to bring clear benefits to:

• Analysis of the use of documents in several files.
• Follow the progress of a file comparing the documents that compose it with the theoretical tree.
• Easily integrate documents into several folders without duplicating them.

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