What is Enterprise Content Management?
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) combines intelligent data capture, document management, and workflow to optimize the entire life cycle of documents and data. ECM succeeds in facilitating collaboration, ensuring compliance, speeding document retrieval, and enhancing overall productivity.
ECM has been a business process automation industry term for nearly two decades and is commonly confused with other buzzwords including content services. When we talk about ECM, we talk about the core capabilities of Scan, Store, and Retrieve.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Capabilities
- Data/Document Capture – Capture, digitize, and index documents and data at their ingestion point, whether via email, invoice, paper form, or other.
- Secure Content Repository – Hold documents and data in a central access point for easy retrieval, use, and version control.
- Assign security and compliance controls — Protect sensitive data with user-assigned access controls and retention policy procedures.
- Automated workflow delivery – Keep processes moving with automated approvals and document/data routing to workflow touchpoints.
What are the benefits of ECM?
Enterprise Content Management systems have game-changing benefits for your enterprise and its digital transformation journey, including:
- Reduced reliance on paper files and storage.
- Relevant and reliable reports and analytics supporting fast and informed business decisions.
- Access to documents and data from anywhere and at any time.
- Your business processes at faster speeds.
Is Enterprise Content Management right for your organization?
In many cases, we’d say that some solutions are better suited for some types of organizations and less suited for others. That’s simply not the case for enterprise content management. Every organization is driven by documents and data, and handling that data quickly, securely, and intelligently will help any organization’s operational efficiency thrive. In other words, if you haven’t implemented ECM, or if your ECM is underperforming, you really should consider a change. We see it as a pretty cut-and-dry fact. Check out our ECM implementation, training, and support services, and consider contacting our staff to make the change happen.
Where can ECM improve efficiency?
Everywhere, but back-office operations have a particular tendency to benefit quickly from ECM for fast and effective return on investment.
- Human Resources — Digitize an enterprise full of employee files while streamlining new hire processes, organizing HR-related information, and ensuring regulatory compliance.
- Accounts Payable — Auto-approve purchase orders and capture crucial data from invoices to eliminate late fees, and improve speed of operations.
- Accounts Receivable –– Gain greater visibility into the entire accounts receivable cycle to remove bottlenecks and improve cash flow. Send sales order information to your accounting systems automatically.
Download the ECM report!
We’ve compiled the most current data on the top six leading Enterprise Content Management platforms. We cover the pros and cons, features, scalability, security and much more to help you make the best decision on what solution is best for your organization.
