- Feb 12, 2019
- Category: Content Management
Big businesses always look for solutions which can resolve their enormous business challenges. Most of these include financial, operational challenges. The ECM software which is also known as the enterprise content management system helps companies in organizing, managing, and distributing the unstructured content which includes images, documents, accounting records, emails, surveys, product information, and web pages. The software tracks, stores, edits and collaborates content creation within the predefined security levels.
It is a set of predefined strategies, processes, and tools which allows businesses for obtaining, organizing, storing and delivering critical information to the customers, stakeholders and the employees. The software helps in streamlining the lifecycle of information with the documented management and automated process workflows. ECM requires time, money and effort for implementation and once integrated into the system provides amazing results such as compliance, collaboration, costs, and continuity.
ECM software acts as a strategic tool for many organizations that look out to improve efficiencies, data security and reduce the paperwork. It has been seen that the implementation of the software has increased productivity, customer satisfaction, inefficiencies exposed, gained a competitive advantage, and cost-effectiveness, thus improving work-life balance.
The 5 major benefits ECM provides to companies are that it keeps track of all of your information, reduces the operation costs, improves customer service, minimizes risk, and help in documenting version control. Businesses have been using these ECM tools to address different challenges. Find out some effective and specific ECM capabilities that businesses implement for meeting their required needs.
1. Basic File Sharing Services:
ECM began with the basic library and file sharing services which is managed within a network repository. Individuals can access the repository and read, update, create and delete files within it. The tools provide capabilities for sharing documents and have the mechanism for notifying individuals about the files instantly. Most of the ECM applications support the library services with the check-in and check-out capabilities. Companies have been deploying the existing generation of ECM within the cloud infrastructure.
2. Content Governance & Records Management:
Managing business documents has been a critical use case for ECM in many of the organizations. Companies need the ECM software for capturing, managing and archiving the files after a specific period. ECM supports compliance requirements for different organizations such as government industries, department of defense and food and drug administration. All the industries have different regulations, and ECM supports the compliance with regulations for financial services such as the Sarbanes Oxley Act, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act for healthcare and others.
3. Content Repositories Linking To The Enterprise Applications:
Many companies have been using these tools as the documents repository created by other enterprise applications. This includes HR, CRM, ERP, and financial systems. The systems can modify or view the content which is managed by the ECM.
4. Business Process Management:
Most of the companies use ECM for establishing workflows that encompass different departments and geographies for supporting enterprise and various business processes. These tools seamlessly incorporate applications such as Excel and Microsoft word for employees, to use them, view or modify it in the workflow context. The ECM software provides tools which are helpful for both the non-technical and technical business users.
The successful integration of BPM (Business Process Management) and ECM improves responses and reduces, in general, human errors. It reduces liability and improves regulatory compliance by creating a complete audit trail for the procedures and documents.
5. Enabling Remote Work-forces:
The content management tools include functionality which allows remote workers for accessing content from mobile devices. In general, the cloud-based infrastructure removes the need for establishing a VPN (Virtual Private Network). The ECM vendors support the deployments which are mainly hybrid where much of the information gets stored in the cloud for easy access to the mobile workforce.
The major benefits which ECM software provide are securing sensitive data. As a cloud-based management system, it will keep sensitive information protected and safe. It fuels the digital workplace and mitigates the compliance risk. The software facilitates engaging employees and driving engagement and productivity. ECM software eases the burden on HR with the help of the targeted communication.
Conclusion:
ECM software integration in businesses can play a critical role in providing quality service to customers. ECM technology stores, captures, manages, measures, integrate & access all the information related to business operations which thus makes it an integral feature for including it in organizational processes. Improved collaboration and universal accessibility effectively connect cities, towns, and nations and with ECM software, companies leverage the potential of a global office. It even empowers employees with the option of setting up their own work hours or from home.