- 3 Mins Read
The Need for Enterprise Content Management
Many businesses, both large and small are focusing on managing their digital documents to provide a collaborative environment throughout their organization. The role of enterprise content management (ECM) is to manage, organize, classify and ultimately distribute content to employees based on their search queries. Most companies decide that they need a strategic enterprise content management (ECM) solution only after they face an overarching business challenge – such as handling too much unstructured information or paper documents that causes bottlenecks when trying to access, process or store business-critical content.
1. ECM for Easy Enterprise Collaboration
Collaborative working is essential in today’s business environment and involves the exchange of information, knowledge and ideas. The more collaboration at work can be improved, the better your business results can be. However, collaboration is usually not a structured process by itself. The increasing amount of information received, the different methods of online communications and the distance among team members can make collaboration between co-workers a challenging task. Also information which is a key factor in all business processes has to be very simple to access on various end devices at all times in order to create optimum value. Enterprise content management software provides tools and forums for collaborative working such as shared workspaces, web-conferencing facilities, discussion forums, wikis, instant messaging etc. to facilitate productive organizational functioning.
2. Managing Correspondence with ECM:
Your organization may have a considerable influx of paper correspondence as well as digital documents which are an integral part of your business processes, but no way to automatically digitize all information from incoming streams such as paper mail, email, fax, etc. and assign them to each process. Often times important decisions are made based on readily available information, but too often that information may be present in someone’s inbox or in paper correspondence waiting to be opened, physically distributed or photocopied. These manual tasks can be error-prone, slows people down and wastes valuable time which could be allocated to more critical jobs. Implementing an ECM software helps to establish end-to-end digital processes that can dramatically reduce the manual digitization efforts and classification of structured documents, e.g. reports or invoices and facilitates a smooth correspondence management process.
3. ECM as Knowledge Management System:
Most growing companies fail to document their accumulated knowledge, resources or standard operating procedures. People go about their usual business and only think about ECM until a critical moment arises. Usually it is when someone quits, when a new person joins the team, or when something goes wrong. With a well-documented operating system in an ECM, employees need not be clueless when one of these critical moments arises. It enables people to make the best decisions using the best possible data.
Does my organization need to implement an ECM Solution?
As the amount of information generated by organizations rises, ECM software helps to solve challenges faced by enterprises by managing, supporting, streamlining or automating their complex business processes. Enterprises are empowered to work more efficiently by eliminating the dependence on paper-based documents and organizing unstructured information which directly impacts the business efficiency, employee productivity, and most importantly turnover. When an ECM software is properly implemented in the enterprise, it improves access to content, enables reuse of content, enhances operational efficiency and provides faster time to market.
Speak with one of our SharePoint experts to learn how your organization can achieve incredible benefits and savings by moving to SharePoint for enterprise content management or any information about successful ECM implementation.
Read further:
Microsoft SharePoint is one of the leading enterprise content management (ECM) platforms on the market and a popular choice among enterprises. Many clients are looking to replace their legacy ECM business solutions with the SharePoint platform. ECM features within SharePoint integrates the management capabilities of SharePoint with the familiar tools of the Microsoft Office system. Read More…
