The New Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

There is no doubt that document management is absolutely essential in today’s business world. Without exceptions. All companies, regardless of their size, handle digital documents and contents. Together with human capital, their documents are their most valuable treasure, since they contain all the business information and insight. That is why in the last few years many companies have chosen to use document software in order to design, maintain, publish and process e-documents, whether scanned or digitally created from scratch.

However, companies’ changing needs have forced Enterprise Content Management vendors to adopt a new, more comprehensive approach that allows offering solutions for all processes that involve data and documents. But make no mistake: What has been done so far has represented a great breakthrough and has been extraordinarily positive. Nevertheless, it is time to face a new stage, in which two aspects will make the difference for ECM vendors: modernization and automation.

ECM - Automation to Save Time

Time is of the essence, so modernization of Enterprise Content Management solutions lies in spending less time managing documents. Document-related tasks have diversified and become more sophisticated. In addition, we all handle more and more information each day. This inevitably raises the question of how we can combine a strong increase in document volume with our need to spend less time managing documents manually. It seems an equation difficult to solve, but the answer lies in automation. After all, it is critical to reduce the tasks to be performed by end users, while keeping adequate efficiency and quality levels.

In fact, the need for more modernization and automation is driven by four factors:

1. New ways of working: 37% of companies’ staff is subject to mobility policies.
2. Collaboration: all the stakeholders of the business ecosystem (suppliers, customers, contractors…) must work closely.
3. Explosion in digital contents: the volume of digital contents is estimated to multiply by 50 between 2010 and 2050. Big Data is here to stay.
4. Cloud infrastructure: 13% of contents are already hosted in the cloud.

In this same line of providing end-to-end solutions, Enterprise Content Management and E2E document software vendors are going beyond, covering multiple areas, e.g. solutions to save toner and ink; to generate, manage and distribute high document volumes; to prepare professional financial reports; to use digital signature tools; and to improve documents and ensure continuity.

Where exactly can I save time with Enterprise Content Management?

The new approach also provides significant improvements compared to traditional document management, which basically lead to saving time. In particular, three advantages can be highlighted:

1. No time is spent entering metadata manually: some tasks that users have performed manually so far could be automated, i.e. extract data from the document and use this information to identify, describe and distinguish the document.
2. No time is spent classifying documents: users do not need to identify the class of digital asset or save it in its location.
3. Less time is spent looking for documents: the software searches for documents and contents in the same way as a person would do thanks to semantics.

Moreover, in order to convince the most skeptical, these savings in time (and also in money) can be translated into irrefutable figures. Below are some examples that show the benefits of document software in general and of the new Enterprise Content Management in particular:

1. Companies invest €17 in time to save a document, €100 to find a lost document and €200 to reproduce it, once found.
2. 7.5% of documents get lost; from the rest, 3% is filed inappropriately.
3. Professionals spend between 5 and 15% of their time reading information, but this figure reaches 50% when it comes to looking for that information.
4. A document is photocopied 19 times on average.
5. There are more than four trillion documents in the US and grow at 22% p.a. (PWC).
6. The number of units we use to keep digital information will have multiplied by 20 by 2020.
7. Users send and receive 133 emails per day on average (source: Radicati Group).
8. A fax machine costs €5,000 p.a., including electricity, paper, ink, etc. (Captaris); the average time required to send a fax is eight minutes.
9. The average price of sending a document by courier is €7-12.
10. The cost of office space has increased by 19% (Office Space Across the World 2008).

Management software. However, the first step is to admit that we need to implement deeper changes than the ones undertaken so far.

http://blog.athento.com/2015/07/el-papel-de-la-automatizacion-en-el-nuevo-enterprise-content-management.html

http://www.athento.com/gestion-documental-inteligente/

https://docpath.com/document-software-systems-solutions/

André Klein
Freelance Consultant for DocPath