In today’s business landscape, everyone is facing a crucial dilemma: how to store my information? How to secure my data? How to manage my content processes? How to make my data more intelligent? Which solution to use?
In this blog, I will show you that, whatever the size of the business, a company should use an ECM/IIM solution to digitally manage the information to support its processes and business goals.
What is it?
An ECM – Enterprise Content Management – is a combination of methods and strategies used to collect, manage, and deliver information in various forms. Information is also stored and archived for future use.
But ECM is not able to manage and analyze unstructured content like emails, rich media, invoices and other records, analytics and more. That’s where IIM arrived as a rebirth of ECM.
IIM – Intelligent Information Management – is the solution to address the growing demands for increased capacity, seamless information integration, time efficiency, and cost savings. In order for you to access all the data you were missing before.
What does it do?
An ECM/IIM solution is not only scanning, storing and retrieving information but a strategic system for collecting data and organizing information. It digitalizes, controls and automates the flow of unstructured information within an organization. It also captures, reads, analyzes and indexes the information. You can annotate, edit or improve the information. It offers workflow and automation tools to ensure that information goes through to the correct approval processes within your organization and is assigned to the right people at the right time.
Why is it important to have such solution?
Having a lot of information to manage, it is not a simple task for a business: store the information, classify the information, retrieve the information… An ECM/IIM solution can help you do just that, and facilitate the routines for processing and analyzing your information in your company. For example, when your information is unorganized, such a solution can help you to structure it. When you need to establish different level of access on the information based on some criteria, such as the departments within your business. When you have a lot of paper format information and you want to digitalize it all.
Regardless of your business’s size or industry, an ECM/IIM solution brings you a lot of advantages!
Who is it for?
At the beginning, ECM/IIM solutions were for large companies because of the cost (infrastructure, licenses, maintenance) and the need of IT teams to implement and manage them. This is not the case anymore! Many ECM/IIM solutions are now affordable and accessible for small and medium-sized businesses, thanks to technological advances, which have virtually eliminated the need of heavy IT resources. The systems became more user-friendly and easier to implement and manage by non-IT people.
Recently, the low-code/no-code for ECM/IIM solutions are a simple and cost-effective way of developing applications without specialized people. Using a straightforward visual interface and drag-and-drop tools, you can reduce the workload on your IT teams and achieve a faster time-to-market of your ECM/IIM solution.
ECM/IIM solutions are now equally suited to all industries or businesses.
Here are some examples:
Healthcare industries has embraced ECM/IIM solutions to reduce costs and improve patient care by managing all their information. Patient information, medications, electronic medical records (EMR), physician notes and lab results are some of the examples. Loosing time to search for patient information — or worse, not knowing it exists — could generate errors and have devastating consequences. In addition, to automate all quality and document management related processes, healthcare industries are using QMS – Quality Management System – solutions.
Banks and financial services are good candidates for ECM/IIM solutions. They manage a high-volume transactions which involves manual document processing. Such solutions digitizes the reports and documents to streamline business processes, improves the speed of business operations, decisions and enhances customer service with a complete customer view.
Administrative departments (HR, Financial, Marketing…) of any companies also needs ECM/IIM solutions to manage all the personal information of their employees (like CVs, motivation letter, contracts, certification, payslips…) but also the client or providers information (like contact info, invoices, contracts…), templates documents, internal documentation.
Retail establishment can use ECM/IIM solutions to run merchandising and supply chain functions as cost-effectively and efficiently as possible. They use it to manage their supplier contracts, orders and shipments and to better understand customers and the markets trends. Providing current and accurate product information allows to improve employee productivity. The use of ECM/IIM solutions enable them to react more quickly to changing market demands, and considerably reduce document storage and handling costs.
Manufacturing industries are also using ECM/IIM solutions to provide a unified platform for all content and data across the enterprise. It is perfect for organizing product data, processing invoices, and managing employee information. It helps managers automate complex business process to
reduce processing times within the enterprise, including project management, financial and procurement services, human resources, compliance and many other areas.
Colleges, universities and other educational institutions accumulate a lot of records which need to be secured, organized, and easily retrieved. That’s why they use ECM/IIM solutions to digitize their documents and formally manage their electronic content. They can store student and employee records digitally, handle applications with electronic workflows, preserve media and documents digitally and automate routine processes.
Governments and municipalities are also using high volumes of documents, including a lot of paper documents. Their document management needs can be unique, and errors can cause serious consequences. They have complicated processes and requirements for document flow. Using ECM/IIM solutions can help them to reduce the footprint, automate their paper workflows, ensure their document security and regulatory compliance and reduce a lot administrative tasks and unnecessary bureaucracy.
As you can see, a lot of businesses are using ECM/IIM solutions in order to control and manage their critical information. They realized that they can save time and money. Visibility and control are the key words.
Conclusion
ECM/IIM solutions can be used by any size of industries or businesses. It is a fact! Any kind of business looking for a solution to cut costs, improve productivity, and streamline business processes will benefit from ECM/IIM solutions. The amount of data generated and manipulated by businesses is increasing a lot, every year, so using such solutions is an excellent way to gain control of the content and save money in your organization, regardless of its size.
Our offer at dbi services
dbi services is specialized in the integration of content management solutions. Our expertise in database, middleware technologies and operating systems guarantees quality implementation of ECM/IIM solutions in your IT infrastructure.
We offer:
- Enhanced expertise: With a deep understanding of content management solutions, our team ensures superior quality ECM/IIM implementations.
- Increased security and compliance: We adhere to the highest standards to protect your data.
- Tailored and effective solution: We finely tune ECM/IIM solutions to your specific needs, boosting the efficiency of your organization.
Our solutions:
For more information: https://www.dbi-services.com/expertises/enterprise-content-management-ecm