10 Ways Enterprise Content Management Supports Your Digital Transformation
Although Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a sprawling topic with no shortage of interesting details to discuss, getting to the point can a serious challenge. This is largely due to the fact that Enterprise Content Management systems are capable of transforming your organization from head to toe in numerous ways. Today, we will keep it short and sweet. We are giving ourselves ten minutes to cover ten ways ECM solutions support your digital transformation. Ready? Let’s get started!
What Are Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Solutions?
The advantages of an Enterprise Content Management system can help your business gain a distinct competitive advantage. From the moment documents are captured and digitized, your business becomes significantly more productive and cost-efficient. Here are ten unique ways ECM benefits businesses:
1. Imaging
Document imaging allows your business to convert paper documents into a digital format. That means no more paper documents or paper storage to manually file through looking for information. Industry-leading ECM solutions can also capture and organize data from documents that have been put through the imaging process to eliminate manual data entry altogether.
2. Document Management
Your business deals with vast quantities of documentation on a daily basis, which means managing and organizing these documents is essential to grease the wheels of your document-related processes. Unfortunately, handling all this paper manually can reduce productivity by a significant margin. Some employees spend upwards of 70% of their time searching for documents. Document management eliminates restores productivity and mitigates menial tasks.
3. Collaboration
Teamwork makes the dream work, and it’s hard to find a tool that makes collaboration as simple and effective as an Enterprise Content Management system. With employees working together on a connected platform that spans your entire enterprise, you can say goodbye to accidents and errors while keeping everyone on the same page at all times.
4. Enterprise Search
Is finding the right document at the right time a problem for your organization? You are not alone. As we mentioned above, manual document retrieval is a time-consuming process that causes your most important business process to sputter and stall. Enterprise search gives your team the ability to search and retrieve all enterprise content permissible to them under your unique business rules.
5. Business Process Management
Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Human Resources, Sales Orders, Customer Service…every department in your enterprise relies on highly specific processes. You’ve built out these processes throughout the years, and, for the most part, they have served you well — but there is still room for improvement! With Enterprise Content Management, all of your content is organized, consolidated, and optimized to ensure that every department is firing on all cylinders.
6. Business Rules Management
Most businesses seek ECM solutions that will give them the tools they need to automate their most time-consuming, manual processes. However, before this can happen, you must have a firm grasp of your unique business rules. An Enterprise Content Management system allows businesses to program business rules into workflow to automate delegation of authority, invoice routing, multi-tiered approvals, and more.
7. Knowledge Management
How efficiently do you handle information and resources within your organization? Most businesses assume that they manage internal knowledge well. The truth is that most businesses have no idea how to gauge knowledge management — one of the many problems that can be solved with ECM solutions. Your individual workers are empowered when they can access the holistic knowledge of your organization, allowing them to increase expertise and better serve you and your customers.
8. Digital Asset Management
Another way ECM solutions can help spur your digital transformation is by helping you better manage your digital assets (i.e., files, videos, music, photos, and other forms of media. As long as you own the rights or have permission to use this media, you have a valuable cache of digital assets that may prove valuable for a wide array of uses. That said, if you want to get the most out of these assets, you’ll need a reliable way to store, organize, and retrieve them without allowing them to fall into departmental silos and, ultimately, obscurity.
9. Records Management
Keeping track of records is crucial to maintain compliance and avoid costly fees. Unfortunately, with company, state, and federal guidelines differing on how long to retain documents, managing all your records can become a tedious exercise in futility. This is where ECM solutions can help. Whether it’s accounting records, bank statements, legal documents, contracts, permits and licenses, insurance documents, employee files, or something else entirely, your Enterprise Content Management system is equipped with the tools to save and retain these records in a secure digital repository. Some ECM solutions even allow for custom retention rules, similar to the business rules we mentioned previously.
10. Web Content Management
If your enterprise relies on large volumes of web-based content to maintain operational efficiency, an Enterprise Content Management system can help you ensure that your team is connected, giving them the ability to create, edit, and publish content from a centralized database.
