This is the third of a series of four posts which aim to demystify enterprise content management (ECM) and shows how some of your biggest business challenges can be solved by ECM technology.
What’s your biggest business challenge?
The two past posts have been about handling too much paper, and access to information in the business. This week’s post will focus on duplicated work and the problems associated with it.
Today, many organisations are using multiple systems to house unstructured information in their business. These documents can include Microsoft office files, images, graphics, video, e-mail etc, and span across the entire organisation. This deluge of content is usually stored on shared network drives, web sites, individuals’ laptops, and so on, making the management of this content, mission impossible.
These disparate systems in businesses today cause duplication of content and effort and make it nearly impossible to effectively reuse content for multiple purposes. Additionally, having content in multiple places makes it very difficult to share content across the business and outside the firewalls with customers, partners, and suppliers.
How many times have you spent time looking for a certain document or file, but given up, and recreated that content yourself? This is a common business problem, in organisations both large and small.
Different document versions
Most companies need to update documents frequently, but it becomes costly to print and store so many documents. There is also the risk of printed documents becoming outdated quickly, or of multiple users emailing old versions of PDFs back and forth and acting on outdated information.
Have you ever searched for a certain piece of information, found it and passed it on to a colleague or even a customer, only to realise that somebody else in the organisation has created a newer version of the same document, meaning you shared outdated or incorrect information?
Our ECM solution constantly monitors and records events that occur in your document repository, meaning you can be sure that employees are working on the latest document – an ECM system allows employees to easily review the latest document versions 24/7, from any location using a web browser. This increased document consistency enables you to successfully manage the creation, revision and distribution of your critical business documents and by reviewing user activity and protecting information from unauthorised access or release, it plays a key role in your organisations risk management strategy.
An organisation’s success is closely related to the efficiency of its everyday business processes. Yet it is surprising that organisations rely on outdated, manual processes that hamper productivity and interfere with effective decision making. In today’s increasingly-complex environment, it’s more important than ever for organizations to streamline operations and to help staff focus more of their time on revenue-generating activities.
Do any of these challenges sound familiar to you? At Collate, we believe the key to finding an appropriate ECM solution is to engage industry experts that have worked in and understand businesses like yours; experts qualified to help you tackle your business challenges.
You can read more about the benefits ECM here.
If you are ready to learn more, you can:
- Download our document management buyers guide
- Contact Greg Littlechild on 01425 484700 or greg@collate.co.uk
- Request a demo, tailored specifically to your exact business requirements.