Document Management System

What is ECM ?

What is Enterprise Content Management?

If you are losing your critical documents, can’t easily find the content when you need, facing compliance challenges and have little or no visibility into your business processes, then Enterprise Content Management (ECM) can be of great help to you.

As content continues to grow exponentially, organizations struggle with managing enterprise-wide unstructured information for collaboration between business processes, business functions, and the extended enterprise. However, simple and passive management and delivery of content is no longer adequate to meeting the complex content management requirements of today’s business enterprise.

Enterprise content management (ECM) — a collection of tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes — is a pragmatic solution to manage the complete content lifecycle. While databases are for structured data ECM addresses the need for managing unstructured data including physical documents, e-mail, word processing documents, digital images, PDF files, and other popular formats.

Types of ECM

Transactional Content Management

Transactional content generally originates outside the organization either through customers or partners and it triggers the start of processing. Transactional content volumes are generally high and processes are long running. Typical examples are invoices, claims and application forms. Transactional content is generated in an organization in different forms including paper or electronic forms, scanned images, computer reports, fax etc. After the entry of the transactional content in an organization, the information contained has to be entered into some sort of database or line-of-business system. This is a prerequisite for further processing of the transaction. Since all transactions go through similar stages of processing, employing an enterprise-level system to manage transactional content becomes a strategic imperative to achieve operational efficiencies.

Collaborative Content Management

At times, to create a document such as a sales proposal, a business plan, or a legal contract, several people at different locations are required to work concurrently. Collaborative content management refers to the tools required to ensure seamless collaboration to allow members of a group to interactively and simultaneously create, review, and edit sales proposals, technical documentation, business plans, legal contracts, or other documents that require collaborative effort, on-line and in real time.

Persuasive Content Management

Persuasive content management is for external communications that can improve customers’, prospects’ and business partners’ experiences substantially. Today organizations find it necessary to communicate with their customers and larger audience via multiple channels like web site, email, personalized mails, call centers, kiosks etc.  Organizations need to use persuasive content for communications to influence customers, prospects and partners. Examples of such persuasive content include physical prints or email of statements, corporate communications like newsletters, product/services catalogue, marketing collaterals, announcement of new blogs and last but not the least the web site.  Persuasive content management can be used to manage the content and at the same time ensure maximum reusability of the content across all the channels for uniform customer, prospect and partner experience.

Key Business Drivers for ECM

• Content Sharing - Efficient aggregation, sharing and usage of various types of information assets are critical to making better business decisions faster.

• Compliance - With information management being under constant scrutiny of regulators, businesses need to address the evolving regulatory compliance requirements, including document retention policies, unstructured information management, and records management.
• Cost Effective Automation - Automation of business processes is necessary to replace manual processing of documents & records, thereby increasing productivity, decreasing processing time, and enabling enterprise-wide collaboration.

• Improved Search – Efficient search and navigation tools result in elimination of the time-intensive search for physical records and information.

• Consolidation of archives - Establishing control over ever-increasing volume of information assets is imperative to mitigate task duplication and minimize time spent in archival and retrieval of information.

Key Components of ECM Suite

ECM essentially provides an integrated platform for enterprise-wide collaboration, process management, and overall content lifecycle management, while at the same time ensuring increased end-user productivity and reduced operational and IT costs. An ideal ECM suite has the following capabilities:

• Capture – Capture tools are used for generating, capturing, preparing and processing analog and electronic information. This can be achieved using multiple channels such as mobile phones, fax, scanners, camera or web.
• Automated Extraction – This component lets you extract business-critical information from Forms for further use in external Database Application, Document Management, Workflow, Business Process Management, Content Management and other Information Management Systems.
• Document Management – One of the most important components of an ECM suite is a Document Management platform which is used for creating, capturing, managing, delivering and archiving large volumes of documents and content.
• High Volume Imaging – Image server is responsible for storage and retrieval of documents and for the entire document lifecycle management, moving documents from online to offline storage, data caching, replication etc.
• Business Process Management – Today, ECM not only implies document, records, and web management, but it also serves as the underlying framework underpinning business processes for seamless exchange of information and collaboration across the enterprise. An efficient BPM system is an essential component of a modern ECM solution.
• Knowledge Management & Collaboration – A Knowledge Management component supports user-to-user document routing and tracking within or across workgroups. It enables classification of an organization's knowledge base using a Knowledge Map and allows creation of Corporate and Individual Knowledge Repositories facilitating collaboration and knowledge sharing.
• Archival – A component for e-mail and reports archival not enables enterprises to manage and maintain their voluminous e-mails and reports but also provides a collaborative tool for business communication.
• Records Management – Records Manager is a critical component of ECM. It is used for managing the complete lifecycle of physical and electronic records from acquisition/creation to destruction/archival while retaining integrity, authenticity and accessibility of the corporate records.
• Integration Adaptation with Business Application –The ability of an ECM suite to integrate with existing applications and services is of utmost importance. An efficient ECM solution should have the capability to integrate seamlessly with the other business applications.
• Web Content Management – A tool that allows users to manage the creation, review and publishing of content over structured web pages for a web based portal such as an Internet Website, Intranet or Extranet solution.