The Challenge
Every day, organizations create a huge volume of unstructured content that includes customer profiles, purchase orders, employee records, financial reports, forms, scanned invoices, contracts, quality documents, engineering drawings and e-mails, among others. The challenge of handling paper, digital content, records and documents is mounting. Studies have shown that unstructured content makes up 80% or more of all corporate information and is growing at an annual rate of anywhere from 65% to 200%, depending on the industry.
At most companies, digital and paper-based content often exist in a state of unmanaged chaos. This content is stored in multiple locations, such as local computer drives, file shares, file folders and file cabinets without a consistent taxonomy for identification. This makes it hard for users to find and reuse the content they need for their daily tasks. The result is time wasted searching for and re-creating information. This also promotes less efficient practices, such as using e-mail as a document collaboration tool.
Organizations are adopting Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platforms to address business challenges associated with unmanaged information. Enterprise Content Management Solutions improve business productivity and agility by providing better access to information and creating a foundation for sharing, securing and reusing this content throughout the enterprise. An Enterprise Content Management platform allows companies to reduce data hardware and software costs while integrating key information in unique ways to exploit new opportunities or quickly adapt to new business requirements.
The Solution
QI Solutions ECM is a software that provides all of the core content management services needed to create, capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content related to organizational processes. It is a practical software solution for centralizing unstructured content and better managing the entire content lifecycle.
The solution provides a set of enterprise content management capabilities, including document and record management, workflows, search and archiving, as well as specific applications, such as contract management and engineering document management system (EDMS), all integrated into a single web-based platform.
Because of the tool’s robust nature and flexibility in managing content-oriented processes, structured documents, such as forms, or unstructured documents such as requests or informal records, can be analyzed and classified. Once documents have been categorized, QI Solutions ECM uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to automatically capture business-relevant information. As a result, this eliminates manual data entry, streamlines operations, and speeds up data availability within the system.
ECM capabilities in combination with the business process management (BPM) solution provide a robust infrastructure for content management, regardless of content type (physical or digital). The solution integrates with existing governance practices, offering flexibility to customize dashboards, reports, and workflows.
The workflow engine is fully configurable and helps automate business processes related to content. This could be a simple review and approval workflow or a more complex multi-stage business process. Users can create and revise documents or send documents to peers or to management for review. Once approved, these documents can be released within the organization. All objects are subject to version control and security, providing a comprehensive audit trail for evidential proof of compliance with industry standards and regulations.
Enterprise Content Management – ECM
Main Benefits
Centralizes all enterprise content in a single environment, streamlining access to information.
Reduces costs of physical document storage.
Minimizes the need to print documents and process paper.
Ensures compliance with legal and regulatory requirements.
Simplifies and accelerates creation, review and publishing of documents.
Promotes collaboration and ensures access to updated content in real time.
Eliminates delays and inefficiencies due to manual processes and use of obsolete documents.
Boosts productivity across the enterprise, by standardizing document control processes.
Automates character recognition and lowers the risk of content being erroneously indexed.
Provides full visibility of tasks, deadlines and teams’ workloads, allowing for identification of bottlenecks and deviations.
Content Capturing
Document Centric Workflows
Digital Signature
Physical Records Management
Audit Trail
Monitoring Portals
Features
CAPTURING: Easy content capturing from different kinds of information sources.
TASK MANAGER: Centralized and intuitive task manager.
EDITING: Advanced document editing with Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365
SEARCH: Efficient and accurate content search, through several filters.
VIEWING: Fast and embedded document viewing, compatible with mobile devices.
MONITORING: Real-time content monitoring through personalized portals
Increasingly, Enterprise Content Management is seen as a bottom line enterprise application and technology with objectives identified as reducing administrative costs, improving efficiency, and enhancing profit.
Commonly, when enterprise professionals discuss the ROI of an investment, they are mostly thinking of “financial” benefits. Today, organizations must also consider the “non financial” benefits of an investment.
Financial Benefits include impacts on the organization’s budget and finances, e.g., cost reductions or revenue increases.
Non Financial Benefits are the so-called “intangibles”, “soft”, or “unquantifiable” benefits of an investment. These benefits include effects on business operations and productivity.
QI Solutions ECM software produces positive impacts on business performance and strategic goals. These include improved customer satisfaction, better usage of current and archived information, and shorter cycle-time.
The benefits calculation for ECM can be both direct, like paper or archival cost savings, and indirect, like productivity or improved quality. Both should be measured for ECM business case efforts.
IDC has estimated that the typical enterprise with 1,000 knowledge workers wastes $2.5 million to $3.5 million per year searching for nonexistent information, failing to find existing information, or recreating information that can’t be found, while Gartner estimates that a Enterprise Content Management can reduce overall document-related costs by 40%.
- Reduces dramatically active filing storage costs (include the physical real estate of the file room, the cost to maintain file cabinets, the cost of folders and index cards, and other hardware review tables).
- Eliminates inactive and archive storage costs through the central control and repository of the document (include the physical real estate, outsourced cost to document storage facilities, cost to retrieve documents, cost of physical items such as boxes, labels, etc.)
- Reduces the number of FTEs (full-time employees) needed to support the paper associated active and inactive storage centers.
- Cuts the hidden costs of having paper present in local files, personal files, and smaller “not official” department file areas. (I keep copies of the reports at my desk because it takes too long to get them from the file room and someone may have already checked it out.)
- Avoids costs of replacing and recovering misplaced, abused, and worn out paper documents. How much does it cost to replace a lost document, find a misplaced document, and replace a document that is no longer legible?
- Companies spend $20 in labor to file a document, $120 in labor to find a misfiled document, and $220 in labor to reproduce a lost document. (Source: AIIM)
- Reduce the cost of legal discovery due to the reduction of records to be searched (through accurate records capture and timely disposal) and the use of more efficient and accurate search and filtering tools.
- Cuts costs and increases revenue by:
- Lowering paper-handling costs.
- Cutting the filing, duplications and retrieval costs of off-site storage.
- Reducing organizational downtime in the case of natural disaster.
- Simplifying business continuity planning.
- Using space currently needed for paper storage for more productive revenue-generating activities.
- Bettering digital asset utilization.
- Increasing collaboration on data and knowledge.
Investment
- Investment in QI Solutions ECM will depend upon the business unit size and implementation approach.
Return on Investment (%)
- ((((Total Annual Savings) x n years) – Initial Investment) / Initial Investment) x 100.
Payback Period (years)
- Initial Investment / Total Annual Savings.
- Increases productivity due to electronic management of the content-content creation, revision, approval, distribution, and cycle time improved as only the newest version is available.
- Saves time by centrally managing the versions for the content.
- Saves IT resources by having the content located and stored once (plus versions) in a central repository.
- Eliminates personal electronic and hard copies spread throughout the business unit and company.
- Provides physical resources reduction as “paper” is no longer printed, marked up, and multiple version copies are filed.
- Increases customer satisfaction leads to increase in customer retention rate, reputation, market share and revenue.
- Improves regulatory compliance by integrating compliance management capabilities into current business processes.
- Reduces paper work and paper needed to print out reports, due to customized views and the comprehensive dashboard.
- Reduces project start-up time, shortens learning curve for project team members and saves time, once the processes, procedures and templates of documents are created and reused.