The Top 10 Things You’ll Save with ECM

Real, measurable benefits guaranteed to cut costs and renew efficiency

across your organization

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These days it’s all about saving. Saving money. Saving time. Saving the planet. Likely, you’ve been given a mission to find a way to save your organization from a multitude of inefficiencies and costs — in one business area or the entire enterprise — that all hinge on one exasperating factor — managing and working with your valuable documents and other business content.

The good news is you’re on the right track by exploring the potential of enterprise content management (ECM) software — specifically, the components of document imaging, document management, workflow, eForms, and records and information management (RIM). Few other singular technology investments can make such an immediate and measurable impact on productivity, profitability and customer service — and save you a lot of headaches in the process.

According to a recent report from Gartner, unstructured content such as documents, images of forms, photographs, XML components, video clips, podcasts and e-mail messages represent the largest body of enterprise information assets. Organizations need ECM to manage the increasing growth, volume and diversity of the unstructured content that now represents up to 80 percent of enterprise information1.

The nuts and bolts of the ECM software you choose are important. Is it built upon a solid technical platform? Does it offer the core functionality that gives you the ability to easily capture, process, collaborate, protect and access your documents and content? Does the technical foundation build into real world solutions that complement and enhance the context of your daily work environment and applications? These are all key questions you’ll want to ask yourself or any potential ECM vendor.

But the first step is understanding the tangible benefits of ECM — the everyday, measurable advantages it can afford your staff, your organization and your customers. What can ECM give you that you’ve never had before … and what can it save?

The Top 10 Things You’ll Save with ECM

Real, measurable benefits guaranteed to cut costs and renew efficiency

across your organization.

According to a recent report from Gartner, unstructured content such as documents, images of forms, photographs, XML components, video clips, podcasts and e-mail messages represent the largest body of enterprise information assets.

1 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management, Gartner, Inc., October 15, 2009.

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Number 10: Time

So many hours of your staff’s time each day

are consumed by manual tasks like searching

folders, filing, hand annotating or even hand

delivering. According to Coopers & Lybrand,

nearly 75 percent of time spent working with

paper-based information is wasted in searching

and filing. Integrated ECM software provides

powerful automated capture, search and

workflow options that streamline tedious

document-intensive activities like these, so

that workers can complete more work in a day.

For government offices in Rockingham County,

North Carolina, enterprise content management

technology has eliminated the need to transport

and wait on documents. With automated

workflow functionality, each area of the

county can electronically route documents

to the appropriate county employee for review

or approval based on specific criteria. When

managers need to take action on documents

in their workflow queues, they receive an

e-mail alarm.

Sift through drawers and drawers of paper, or

access the precise information you need with a

single click from your computer screen? The time

savings is obvious. By putting information at

workers’ fingertips within the context of their

familiar software applications, daily processes

like invoice processing, personnel recruiting

and payroll activities become simplified and

productivity becomes second nature.

Number 9: Space

When business processes require lots of paper,

that paper requires lots of storage. More storage

equals less space for more important uses like

people and equipment. With the document

imaging functionality of an ECM system,

you can quickly and easily capture, store and

organize millions of paper documents into a

secure, electronic repository that’s much more

compact and convenient than any old school

filing cabinet or storage unit.

At North Kansas City Hospital, a driving force

behind the document management project was

the human resources department, where the

weight of more than a million paper files for

the hospital’s 3,000 employees had the filing

room floor in danger of collapsing. Since the

implementation of their ECM system, the

overstuffed file cabinets have been completely

eliminated, resulting in significant cost savings

and additional office space.

“We estimate that, just in HR alone, (our ECM

software) saves us about $100,000 a year,” said

Karen Arora, systems administrator for the

hospital. Now the days of walking all over

the hospital for information are gone. Once

content is captured, it’s available to authorized

users with a single click.

“We estimate that, just in HR alone, (our ECM software) saves us about $100,000 a year.”

Karen Arora Systems Administrator North Kansas City Hospital

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Number 7: Your resources

Your resources — human or otherwise — are

valuable and using them wisely can save your

organization tremendous costs. Paper-intensive

activities contribute to a great deal of waste in

time, money and energy. We’ve already talked

about space and dollars, but what about the

energy — keeping your people happy with the

work they’re doing and contributing to their full

potential? The right ECM software brings ease

and speed to tedious tasks. When designed for

ease of use, an ECM system is quick for users to

learn and results in fast adoption and smooth

transition from the old ways to the new. An

ECM system also can help you move with the

times by easily accommodating remote employee

workflow and document access — a timely way

to reduce staff overhead costs.

At the University of Minnesota, prior to

implementing ECM, the office of student

finance managed a staff of 36 students on

various schedules, the equivalent of 13 full

time staff. After investing in an ECM system?

Now just one full-time staff member and

two part-time students run the entire unit,

resulting in staff salary savings of $116,688

per year. The space once filled with filing

cabinets is now being used more effectively

by other departments.

Similarly, at Piggly Wiggly, ECM has automated

business processes to the extent that six PWCC

employees, once consumed by manual tasks,

have found new positions within the company

that allow them to better utilize their professional

skills. The effects of ECM can create improved

productivity for your organization and at the

same time give your staff members more

satisfaction in their job activities.

Number 8: Dollars

We use the words “efficiency” and “success”

to mean a lot of things in business. But at the

end of the day, the biggest part of the meaning

comes down to dollars — how to control costs

and meet a budget while maintaining a high

level of productivity. A 2008 Gartner Executive

Programs study surveyed more than 1,000

CIOs worldwide regarding their IT budgets.1

Twenty-three percent of those CIOs reported

a decline in their budget.

Citizens Memorial Healthcare, a regional

hospital in Southwest Missouri, calculated that

their hard costs in one year of paper and the

people power to handle that paper equaled

over $1M.

An ECM software suite designed to integrate

easily, deploy quickly and require little

maintenance and support — in a single

department or several — is key to immediate

cost savings and rapid return on your

technology investment. That means a lower

total lifetime cost. Not to mention, that ECM

by its very definition eliminates manual

paperwork and all that comes with it —

overhead costs like paper, toner, couriers,

postage and additional staff hours are reduced

or can be outright erased immediately.

A good place to start? Paper-intensive, key

operational departments like accounts payable

and human resources. Dolly Droze, director

of corporate accounting for Piggly Wiggly

Carolina Company (PWCC), estimates that

their ECM system saves PWCC $223,000

annually by reducing overheads and manual

tasks in the corporate accounting division

alone. There are proactive revenue benefits,

too. A powerful ECM system that processes

documents with greater accuracy and speed,

reduces the possibility for errors and helps

your AP department hit early payment

deadlines, increasing the opportunity for

discounts or price cuts from vendors.

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1 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management, Gartner, Inc., October 15, 2009.

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Number 5: A tree or two

Going green has become a common theme among both the private and public sector communities. So it seems only fitting that more and more organizations are seeing document imaging and document management software — two core components of ECM — as a strategic element of their green initiatives.

When paper was its only option, Cornell University admissions staff dreaded the daunting task of manually sorting undergraduate applications each fall. Employees lugged incoming student applications to a processing center a mile and a half away from the main campus, drove them to the admissions offices for selection decisions, and then transported them back to the processing center. Implementing the right ECM software solution helped the university eliminate this cumbersome, wasteful delivery procedure, cutting fuel costs and minimizing paper use in the process. Cornell employees benefit from a simplified admissions process, and the environment is spared needless carbon dioxide emissions.

ECM captures and organizes the existing paper files, removes the need for future ones and automates workflow and collaboration with partners and vendors across the organization. With ECM your organization can truly set the stage for a paperless way of working every day.

Number 6: Aspirin

Unfortunately, there’s no pill for the headaches brought on by process bottlenecks and resource limitations when it comes to managing your business content manually. But you can alleviate the symptoms at their source using ECM software that’s designed to integrate easily within your existing business applications and environment, getting your users up and running swiftly with a minimal learning curve.

At Burnley College, located in Lancashire in the United Kingdom, it took the finance department just two weeks to get up to speed with their ECM software system, including installation time. Training the 40 staff members to use the system individually took just 10 to 15 minutes per person. The team was surprised by the ease of use, and after just three weeks, more than 95 percent of their invoices were being dealt with electronically.

If just the idea of adopting new technology starts your head throbbing, an ECM offering with deployment options can help take the burden off your IT team’s shoulders. Software as a service (SaaS) and hosted deployment are just two alternatives to the traditional means of licensing and managing an ECM system on your own. These options can provide great flexibility and value and enable you to maintain focus on your business and customers, not ECM software support and infrastructure.

Admissions leaders at California Institute of Technology chose to employ a hosted ECM deployment option in the face of security, time and resource challenges that affect many institutions. Now they enjoy zero downtime and peace of mind knowing that all Caltech student records are protected and that skilled technical professionals are managing their admissions environment around the clock.

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Number 3: Your customers’ satisfaction

As the old saying goes, if one customer has a bad experience, they tell six other customers. In today’s competitive marketplace, you can’t afford that kind of negative press. The conventional view of customer service is that it often involves waiting, lots of questions and the inevitable callbacks.

ECM, however, brings speed and ease to a once slow and inefficient but essential area of your business. With documents and content, such as customer invoices, correspondence and purchase or service records, literally at your fingertips, answers to customer inquiries are only a click away.

At Illinois Mutual Life Insurance, their ECM system has reduced the time it takes to answer a policy request by 75 percent, greatly enhancing customer service. At AmFed, a leading provider of insurance and insurance-related services in Mississippi, authorized employees have instant, single-click access to any detail in policyholder files, enabling them to answer customer queries immediately. “We don’t have to call people back, so long distance phone charges have been reduced,” said Jennifer Muse, director of special projects at AmFed. “(Our ECM system) gives us more time to focus on our insureds and claimants.”

An automated business is a smooth-running business that shows to your customers. Better customer service increases the likelihood of repeat business, customer loyalty and much more positive word of mouth among customers and their peers.

Number 4: Your data integrity

Regardless of your organization’s size or line of business, compliance and regulations are always a critical point of concern — not to mention disaster recovery. While various regulations may be aimed at different industries or areas of business, they all essentially require organizations to address three key things — data integrity, confidentiality and accessibility. That means you must preserve the integrity and confidentiality of your records and be able to produce them in an appropriate and timely manner. Without a centralized repository to store the vast amounts of unstructured data generated across your organization, meeting regulatory requirements is almost impossible.

Ultimately, compliance and disaster recovery hinge on security. Using ECM that provides a central, secure electronic repository for all important documents and content is the first step. Advanced document and system security measures, such as digital signatures, authentication and auditing capabilities, also should be built into your ECM software technology to protect every document stored in the system. So whether you are handling sensitive patient information, highly classified documents or just everyday invoices, you can be confident that your documents are safe, secure and in the right hands.

Using the built-in security features of their ECM system, Asante Health System strengthens its HIPAA compliance efforts by automatically restricting access to confidential patient data. Replacing paper folders with electronic document images minimizes the risk of unauthorized viewing as well as document misplacement.

“We don’t have to call people back, so long distance phone charges have been reduced. (Our ECM system) gives us more time to focus on our insureds and claimants.”

Jennifer Muse Director of Special Projects AmFed

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Number 1: Your seat at the big table.

We’ve come full circle to your original mission — finding a solution to a multitude of inefficiencies and costs that perhaps plague one business area or your entire organization. Your organization’s leadership is looking to you for guidance and results that will bring immediate positive impact on costs and efficiency, and quick return on investment but also long-term benefits and opportunities for expansion and growth. By selecting the right ECM software technology, you can deliver.

The University of Minnesota has seen a dramatic return on their ECM investment. In its early stages of deployment in only three departments, the university estimated yearly costs savings of $250,000 and 700,000 pieces of paper. Five years later, with ECM expanded to more than 30 departments across five campuses, the savings in time, storage, office supplies and salary have grown exponentially.

Explore the proven impact of ECM software technology and discover your potential for greater business success. You’ll see that by simply putting your documents and content into the context of your everyday business processes, you can make dramatic gains in operational efficiency and cost-savings, and secure your seat at the big table.

Number 2: Your competitive advantage

It’s a busy marketplace out there. Businesses are always looking for ways to set themselves apart and outpace the competition. But gimmicks and marketing are no match for creating genuine operational efficiency, quality of service and bottom line sustainability. By adopting new technology that lays the framework for these benefits, you can solidify your reputation among not just your peers, but the greater business community, as a market leader and an innovator.

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In its early stages of deployment in only three departments, the university estimated yearly costs savings of $250,000 and 700,000 pieces of paper.

© 2010 Perceptive Software, Inc. ImageNow is a registered trademark of Perceptive Software.

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