Every business has many systems, processes, forms, and so on, but few businesses can manage them well. There are often many versions of a file, I don't know which version is latest and which file is currently running. This may seem like a small thing, but it brings a lot of trouble to enterprise.

My current company is like that, at first all documents were placed in administration and issued for OD, but it was not easy to request. It will later be stored on DingTalk cloud drive, but it's not clear yet. Later, I installed document management software, so it gradually became standardized. The standardization of file management mainly includes following steps:

1. Centralized responsible department: all company documents are centralized in one department for management, including document classification, unified numbering, verification, registration, storage, iteration of changes, deletion, etc. It is necessary to develop a "Document Management System" and bring it to to attention of all staff. Only documents approved by central department of company can be implemented.

Second, file management tools. Businesses are encouraged to use file management software. Such software can find author, reviewer, and publisher of each document, and there are certain points in time. Support for modifying and deleting documents. The approval flow can be customized to match organizational structure when a document is released. You can also set different viewing, downloading, and managing permissions for different levels of staff, and support encryption. So document management in a company can be very standardized and everyone will have a single local query and all they see is latest versions.

3. Checking documents. Every company's documents need to be checked regularly. Check if documents are complete and if descriptions in documents correspond to reality. For forms you normally use, is version latest version of system? With such continuous PDCA, company-wide document management will become more and more standardized.

Document management may seem like a trivial matter, but most companies fail to manage it properly. The main reason is that all files and forms need to be constantly modified and optimized, if management is not good, then this will cause chaos in company. Some departments are running version 1.0 and some departments are running version 2.0, resulting in a very confusing communication and execution. Company standards must start with document management!