What are the EDMS (electronic document management systems) for an industrial organization?

Question

Document flow

There is a certain organization engaged in the manufacture of furniture. They are a full-fledged factory that manufactures furniture completely from scratch, including the production of raw materials for this.
Tell me, please, what are the electronic document management systems (EDMS) that allow you to automate and speed up many business processes in the company? For example, move away from the use of paper between departments of the company, and switch to an electronic format for exchanging documents. What is there besides 1C? Are there ready-made web-solutions?
And in general, is it worth ordering the development of such a workflow system from scratch if the company has a lot of "individual" needs?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I am quite familiar with only one "document management" system - Alfresco.
Alfresco has 2 versions: community - free and Enterprise - actually paid. Next, I will talk about the experience of using the first free version, but I suspect that it can be extended to many other similar EDMS.
So, firstly, the Community version is essentially an unstable Enterprise branch. As soon as the Community becomes stable, it is released and turned into an Enterprise, in other words, if there are errors in the system (and there are), then they will nevertheless be fixed, perhaps quickly enough. If you follow the repository, you can independently collect releases from there and roll them out to your server.
Secondly, Community is free - rather conditional. No, by itself you get an absolutely working version and for free (maybe there are nuances there), but there is one thing - the availability and cost of sane specialists: there are few of them and they are quite expensive.
Thirdly, Alfresco can be changed to suit your business processes (in the sense of coordinating documents and workflow in general), but due to the rather complex architecture of the solution, as I said earlier, very few do it correctly and competently, which is why decisions , which are obtained - most often do not have such criteria as the integrity of documents (by integrity I mean the term from the database, when a document, if located somewhere, must satisfy the current rules. It may happen that the rules have changed, but the document has remained without satisfying them lie in some thread of the registry) or consistency (links between data are broken. For example, data from another registry is used in one of the registries. The entry from the registry was deleted, only partial information remained in the other registry).
Fourth, of course, there is documentation for Alfresco - it is good and sufficient, but after several years of working with it, I realized that the documentation always lacks nuances, without which this monster simply does not work. The problem can be hidden anywhere (for example, we added a model and added data for this model, then the model was deleted, the data remained. Alfresco version 4, in my opinion, simply does not start at this stage. Yes, perhaps this is logical, but in order to to delete data on this model - it was necessary to pervert a lot and find out how to do it.Because of this problem, at one time the transition from version 3 to version 4 of Alfresco was difficult for those who used any major add-ons).
Fifth, Alfresco requires maintenance - backups, data cleaning, recycle bin setup, search setup, server setup (rather demanding on hardware after a certain amount of indexed data, because full-text search is built in there). True, there is a cloudy version, which can undoubtedly be a plus.
Sixth, seventh and .. - I can describe the shortcomings of the system for a long time, however, the pluses can also be described. But my opinion is that Alfresco (like many other similar systems) is not suitable where global alterations are required (for example, such a simple action as matching the regular structure of users from Alfresco will either have to go through the AD server and the services \ departments \ positions configured there, or some other rake). My opinion - you need to change your internal processes for already developed solutions. Internal processes do not bring profit - they are designed to reduce costs, therefore it is better to reduce the uniqueness of internal workflow processes. Otherwise, this revision will result in a year / two development / implementation, nerves and wasted money and time.
And the algorithm should be as follows: you come to the GeniiSED office and say, we would like to implement an EDMS and we want to use some ready-made configuration / solution. What do you have? Next, you personally have to study what solutions are available, you personally have to think about which ones suit you best, after which you ask for a demo stand with this ready-made solution and for a month you will test it with the full interest of the team. Without all this, you will be sold an eggnog.
My opinion - use any ready-made 1C configurations with minimal alterations: there is also support there. and integration with other 1C solutions (at least some).