DMS software for your document management

Document management software

For companies, digitization is one of the main topics with regard to increasing efficiency and improving customer service. In this context, document management with the help of a document management system is at the heart of IT-strategy. The term document management refers to the organization of documents. A document management system or DMS software refers to the electronic management of documents. These systems originated with the emergence of the first electronic archiving systems in the early 90s of the last millennium. Since then, employees have been able to manage their documents electronically. Electronic document management significantly increases employee productivity.

Since then, document management has evolved and is now also referred to as document management systems or enterprise content management systems ECM. This is accompanied by an expansion of the scope of document management away from pure archiving to general support of operational processes.

The humbee system is not just a fully-fledged document management system. Rather, with its focus on the process as the central architectural element, humbee represents a significant conceptual extension of the previous DMS software. For entrepreneurs who rely on this modern form of document management, this results in significant advantages in terms of process optimization, scalability and user-friendliness.

Document management begins, especially in small and medium-sized enterprises, with the digitization of incoming invoices or the digital management of contracts – contract management. Both are solutions provided by a document management system. Companies that choose humbee as the central platform for their digitization strategy often focus first on important core processes that significantly improve efficiency and customer satisfaction throughout the company.

Document management with a DMS software is therefore often used for processes around the topics of processing customer inquiries and orders, customer acquisition (CRM) and order processing. Later, the more classic DMS processes are added: digital processing of incoming invoices, contract management or digital personnel files.

Before selecting a document management system, companies should draw up a checklist of topics and processes whose digitization promises the greatest value added. In order to successfully introduce DMS software, it is advisable to test the document management system in question free of charge for a certain period of time and to implement the planned process as a prototype.

You will soon discover that there is more to humbee than just classic document management. Already during the selection of the DMS software you can convince yourself live of the efficiency and simple system configuration. This not only saves time and money during implementation. Subsequent changes to processes or the mapping of additional topics will also be quick and cost-effective. In addition, you will achieve visible improvements in the satisfaction of your employees and customers.

With the decision for a document management system, you ideally make a decision about a long-term successful partnership. For this reason, even small and medium-sized companies should convince themselves in advance of the provider's capabilities. Let us show you the solution and check whether it can be introduced risk-free, quickly and cost-effectively. In the process, our cloud solution adapts to your company like a tailor-made suit.

DMS features

DMS features

Electronic document management enables the storage, management of and work with digital documents. Certain basic functions of a document management system are required for this:

  • Import of digital documents that either already exist digitally or have been digitized by scanning.
  • Extraction of data from digital documents. So-called OCR technology is often used for this purpose.
  • Storage and versioning of documents.
  • Possibility of defining document types and associated attributes or properties.
  • Organization of documents in digital files.
  • Determination of retention periods and consequent effective prevention of deletion during the retention period.
  • Powerful search procedures and full text search.
  • Powerful authorization concept for effective protection against unauthorized access.
  • Good integration of Microsoft Office and Outlook, including management of MS Office templates.

In addition to these basic functions, advanced capabilities are often added to increase the range of uses of a document management system for employees:

  • Powerful, long-term stable REST API for integrating other software products, such as ERP system or websites.
  • Seamless integration with transaction processing like it is provides by humbee.
  • Ability to share documents with external users. This way you avoid using shadow systems such as DropBox or GoogleDrive.
  • Powerful methods for creating PDF documents
  • Powerful methods for extracting data from PDF documents
  • Powerful procedures for handling photos, videos or audio files.
  • Integration of WebDav.
  • Usability on mobile devices.

Small and medium-sized companies should also make sure that the new solution also provides the advanced functions. This is the only way to really increase employee productivity.

With a powerful modern document management system like humbee, companies effectively reduce the flood of paper and e-mail, protecting employees from time-consuming searches for information.

Document management and email

Most companies are not aware that emails are nothing else as electronic documents. In fact, the term e-mail only refers to the way they are transported. In this respect, it increases productivity if e-mails can be freed from personal mailboxes and transferred to the document management system.

As soon as e-mails are understood as documents and stored in an electronic file, or even better, in a process, they are available to all users in the document management system.

Ideally, then, e-mails are sent and received from processes. If this is not possible, it should be possible to import them into the document management system simply by drag and drop.

Modern document management systems often provide procedures that monitor mailboxes and automatically import incoming e-mails and start corresponding processes. The burden on employees caused by the flood of e-mails decreases and productivity increases.

Document management and office documents

In modern document management systems, new Office documents are created directly in the process and processed with Microsoft Office. This saves the otherwise necessary step of importing. Employees can no longer forget this step. Files are always complete.

With humbee document management and Microsoft Office, it is even possible to create Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents directly. Document templates can even automatically transfer data from transactions, increasing employee productivity. All documents are immediately available for full-text search in the document management system.

DMS Software with OCR Text Recognition

Paper documents are processed using OCR text recognition. OCR technology recognizes individual letters and makes them available for full-text search.

From full-text searchable documents, modern DMS software can extract properties automatically. For example, from incoming invoices, information about the invoice amount, invoice date and number, and the supplier are automatically determined. Without document management, time-consuming manual invoice entry is necessary.

How reliable is DMS software with OCR

In the early days of OCR at the beginning of the seventies of the last century, as the term „Optical Character Recognition“ still suggests, only individual characters such as letters and digits were recognized and stored. Therefore, the error rate was high at that time and one could not yet speak of true text recognition.

However, text recognition has evolved in parallel with DMS software in recent years. Thus, corrections at the pixel level have gradually been supplemented by corrections at the character and word level. Matching with dictionaries and the use of AI-based methods have significantly improved the quality of text recognition.

Recognizing handwriting with OCR has been the biggest challenge in the past. However, new machine learning techniques have led to significant benefits here as well.

Automatic text recognition with OCR has become very reliable thanks to these techniques and forms the basis for many functions in DMS software.

Archiving documents and managing them digitally offers great advantages for employees when searching. Searching for documents and emails is time consuming without electronic document management. A good document management system makes it easier to find documents, files and emails. When using humbee, you can even find transactions in virtually no time.

The goal of a good search is a small hitlist. This is the only way to find what you are looking for quickly in the document management system and to have access to the information you need at any time. Humbee document management provides a search technology specially developed for this purpose. The time spent by employees searching for information is reduced by over 90 %.

Collaborate on documents

Generally, employees need to collaborate on business transactions in the document management system. With humbee, everyone (who is supposed to) has access to the transaction and thus, of course, to the content of the transaction. This includes the documents.

These documents can be edited by any employee who has access to the transaction. The automatic versioning in the document management system is also a great advantage. Nothing is lost and employees can access previous versions of the document at any time.

Since the documents are part of an operation or process, employees can of course also communicate with each other within the operation and, for example, discuss the processing status of documents.

You can even invite external parties, e.g. customers, suppliers, experts or lawyers, who are not humbee users, as guests to your processes and thus work together in document management. An advantage that only a few providers offer.

Share and access documents

Documents stored in the humbee document management system can be made available to external recipients easily and without having to go through providers or solutions such as DropBox, OneDrive or GoogleDrive. Employees simply create a link in the document management system and send it to the recipient.

In this way, you reliably provide the current document version. In doing so, you avoid copying documents in external platforms and retain full control.

Access rights for documents

Most documents have a transaction reference and are therefore stored in transactions. Anyone who has access to the task therefore also has access to the documents it contains. Conversely, all documents are protected from unauthorized access by the strict permissions system in humbee document management.

Someone who has no rights to a document will not even know that it exists.

Change history

Documents are automatically versioned whenever they are changed. This means that employees always have access to the latest version of a document.

At the same time, the complete history allows changes to be tracked at any time. Who saved which version and when? The answer is securely stored in the version history.

Digital signatures

Documents stored in humbee can also be digitally signed in the humbee system in a legally secure manner. To do this, humbee integrates the proven systems of specialized providers.

The time when employees had to print out a document, sign it and then scan it in again is finally over with humbee.

Read more about electronic signatures here.

Workflows DMS

Workflows for DMS

Workflows are used in a document management system for process automation. The goal is to increase the productivity of employees. In the humbee system you can use workflows to automate a wide range of tasks.

For example, you can create, convert to PDF, encrypt and send documents on an event-driven basis.

Spatially separated teams are not only connected by humbee, but also effectively supported by the document management system in process automation. In this way, even small and medium-sized companies benefit from a powerful solution.

Automation of business processes

Document management systems regularly claim to optimize and automate business processes. This is often only successful for document-centric processes such as the invoice receipt process or contract management.

With humbee DMS software, even complex processes can be optimally supported. Due to the advantage of the transaction-centered architecture, complex inquiry and acquisition processes, for example, are mapped.

The document management system automatically converts an inquiry received by e-mail into a process. The system automatically sends a confirmation of receipt. The process is visualized on a Kanban board and a team member pulls it into his own processing, which of course takes place in the DMS software.

Now costing and quotation generation take place. Internal queries in the warehouse or in product development also take place directly in document management without the detour via e-mail. Every employee with customer contact has access to the complete data in the process. This means that everyone is fully informed and able to provide information when talking to the customer. Your customer experiences inspiring customer service.

Processes are optimized and employee productivity increases. Documents and information are no longer lost The document management system always provides the current document version. Time-consuming searches are no longer necessary and time-consuming consultations are significantly reduced through the use of the document management system.

DMS advantages

Other advantages of humbee

Humbee is a powerful DMS software that your employees can use easily and intuitively. The benefits go far beyond a classic document management system. With its modern transaction and cloud-based architecture, humbee document management offers an intuitive user interface, is quickly implemented and can be easily adapted to your company at any time.

Unlike old, large and expensive systems, humbee also benefits small and medium-sized businesses.

DMS software in the cloud

Your data is stored securely in the humbee system in European multi-certified high-security data centers. The document management system stores data with multiple redundancies. You can access your data from the system at any time and from any location.

Whether you work in the office, at home or on the road – your data is always with you. With integrated two-factor authentication, the document management system provides you with bank-level security. You can start small with selected processes and a few employees and expand your humbee document management step by step to increase productivity. Operate document management with maximum security without investment risks.

Advantages of DMS software from the cloud

  • no own IT infrastructure necessary
  • no installation necessary
  • the latest version at all times – without updates or release changes
  • manageable costs
  • central and redundant storage of documents and processes
  • system provisioning in minutes
  • additional users can be added at any time, including individual users
  • also suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises
  • Further information on the topic: DMS in the cloud

The solutions of different providers have different histories. The humbee system, for example, was designed from the beginnen as a cloud solution. Other providers are mostly designed for on-premise operation. This is especially true for the German providers that entered the market as early as the 1990s. d.velop AG was founded as early as 1992 and did not announce its cloud solution for document management for small and medium-sized enterprises until 2020 (see press release dated 27.10.2020). The provider Windream GmbH even entered the market in the 1980s. This vendor did not introduce its interface to Amazon's S3 cloud storage until 2019 (see press release dated June 11, 2019). The vendor easy software AG was founded in 1990, and ELO digital Office GmbH was founded in 1998.

Multilingual DMS software

Humbee document management is multilingual. Every user can easily change the language of the humbee interface. Humbee document management is thus not only usable by companies with locations in different countries – foreign partners who are not humbee customers can also be invited as guests and thus also understand and operate the interface of the system.

DMS software and interfaces

With other DMS software, interfaces to e-mail programs or to Office products are important. Not so with humbee. E-mail integration, Office integration, use of Office templates, PDF handling and workflows are seamlessly integrated in humbee at no extra cost.

CRM, contract management or digital personnel files are applications of a DMS software and are quickly realized through simple customizing. The completeness of humbee ensures smooth use – easily and without additional costs.

For more advanced integrations, humbee document management provides a versioned REST API. In addition, humbee has a number of apps that further extend the functionality of the document management system:

  • ERP integration (e.g. DATEV, LexOffice or SAP)
  • Integration with GoogleMaps
  • WordPress PlugIn
  • DHL Integration

New integrations are constantly being added, increasing the benefits for employees and opening up new productivity reserves.

Document management with support

Humbee is DMS software and transaction processing with powerful support. With us, your employees reach real people who have years of expertise in running, implementing and supporting humbee systems.

We are personally available by phone and email.

We also provide a comprehensive manual and video tutorials. Here, your employees will learn in short clips how to for example automatically label documents or processes.

Test the DMS system free of charge

Would you like to test the humbee document management system free of charge? Test the humbee DMS software without obligation for 30 days.

We will support you with free support and, if you wish, with a free webcast. In this webcast we will find out together how your requirements can be put into practice with humbee document management.

DMS security

Security of a Document Management System

Not only international corporations, but also small companies must pay attention to legally compliant archiving in DMS software. Audit security and compliance with the GoBD are elementary in a document management system used in Germany.

In addition, a powerful authorization concept in the DMS system ensures that your documents and data are reliably protected from unauthorized access.

The modern cloud architecture of the document management system uses up-to-date and monitored software components based on globally accepted standards.

Audit security of DMS software

The term revision security has become established over the years. It means that changes to documents and data stored in the document management system can be tracked at any time. Humbee logs changes to property fields and stores them in the audit log.

GoBD compliant document management

In several letters, most recently on November 28, 2019, the German Federal Ministry of Finance has specified the requirements for the principles for the proper keeping and storage of books, records and documents in electronic form and for data access (GoBD).

These requirements can be reliably met with the humbee system.

Data protection DSGVO

As a company, you are also obliged to comply with the provisions of the European Data Protection Regulation (DSGVO) regarding the storage and processing of personal data when using a document management system. In particular, data economy, the obligation to provide information about stored data and the deletion obligations should be supported by the DMS software.

The DMS software humbee supports you effectively in the fulfillment of this obligation. Transactions and documents are assigned to business objects and contacts in humbee. This allows you to quickly and reliably find all data stored in the system related to a specific person.

In contrast, distributed storage of documents in file systems, communication and sending of documents via email and the use of a variety of messaging and collaboration platforms without the use of a document management system make it difficult to comply with the DSGVO / GDPR.