More and more businesses are discovering how Enterprise Content Management can help achieve revenue goals while keeping the costs down, through effective management of business content.
The ability to manage and improve the speed and process of delivering the right information to the right people at anytime, anywhere is crucial and fundamentally important to the survival of any business. Yet document processing has become one of the biggest challenges most businesses face today.
In this Internet age, the majority of business information exists in digital forms such as text documents, spreadsheets, websites and real-time online transactions. Such information is largely unstructured and thus not easily captured by normal business intelligence systems.
On the other hand, customers are demanding increasingly faster response times unlike a decade ago. For example, two to four weeks is no longer acceptable for the processing of an application; instead, a one-day or an immediate turnaround is a common expectation.
At the same time, organisations are also beginning to realise that an effective customer relationship management strategy requires valuable customer information to be captured and integrated into the organisation's business workflow right from the start of the customer engagement process.
In order to capture this information effortlessly in a structural format for easy retrieval, a specialised solution is thus desirable. As a result, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions are fast becoming important tools for you to stay on top of the ever increasing sea of information that is being churned out by the minute.
In fact, more and more businesses discover that ECM can help you to achieve your revenue goals while keeping the costs down. This trend is also recognised by research firm Gartner; it estimated that the ECM market was worth US$2.9 billion in 2007, and will grow by another 12.9 per cent through 2011.
An ECM solution offers an efficient way for a business to manage business content. The ideal ECM process should address your business pain points such as, organising the customers' transaction details in a systematic manner for easy retrieval and providing flexibility to the system with optional features to cater to future business needs. The following are some examples of the many useful features available in a typical ECM solution.
Firstly, there is the electronic means of capturing and storing of all documentation into a single repository. This is followed by applying priority rules to automatically route information to the right people to provide prompt responses to queries.
This process employs powerful information retrieval tools to search folders and organise the various categories within the repository. Lastly, the information is stored as a 'laminated' document when it is no longer active as part of a formal record management control. This ensures that the record is protected to comply with business procedures and regulatory requirements.
Whatever the features are used, when correctly implemented according to your organisation's requirements, the effort to transform the way your business operates through ECM should result in effective streamlining of business processes. The benefits include:
- Improving customer service with better, faster and more complete responses.
- Eliminating the inefficiency, expense and risk of a paper environment in which documents are handled sequentially and can easily be misplaced.
- Managing and appropriately associating all types of related business information, including scanned documents, digital pictures, application documents and e-mails, in a common virtual folder.
- Providing overall control for business processes as required by the business standard operating procedure, industry benchmarks, or regulatory factors.
- Enhancing the market position in comparison to competitors who are still lagging behind with manual processes and paper documents.
A good example of a company that has gained from the integration of ECM into their ICT infrastructure is Sembawang Marine Offshore Engineering (SMOE), a subsidiary of Sembcorp Marine. SMOE, which has been using ECM for about eight years now, has been able to plug any possible leakage of confidential company documents and archive them easily.
The organisation's 700 employees have also been able to retrieve information, such as CAD drawings, videos and cost estimate samples from their company database of several hundred thousand documents quickly and systematically. By doing away with manual documentation, the productivity of SMOE increased significantly and this provides better services for their existing and prospective clients.
Ultimately, an effective ECM system will enable you to better manage any information throughout its life cycle, organise the content sequence that flows throughout the entity and deliver it in a manner that enhances your business process and overall productivity.
- This article is contributed by EMC Corporation, a member of the Singapore infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF).
- This article first appeared in The Business Times on 11 November 2008 and information is correct at the time of publication.
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