Considering Case Management? 4 Questions to Ask a Solution Provider
Whether we’re talking about a life partner, a business partner or an enterprise information platform, you don’t want to start any kind of relationship without all relevant information—or worse yet, go in blind. Selecting a case management solution provider is no different.
Once you’ve decided that dynamic case management capabilities are a fit for your organization, choosing the right vendor and solution is a significant step forward. The right relationship delivers the tools you need to tackle dynamic, unstructured work and equip your knowledge workers with the right information, in context, to effectively manage cases, incidents, customer relationships, investigations and requests.
When evaluating vendors for new case management software or to replace an antiquated tool, make sure to ask potential suitors these four questions:
1. What’s Your Solution Development Mantra?
When it comes to creating a case management solution, the “how” is just as important as the “why.” Keep in mind the IT support and involvement required for different solution development methods, including changes and maintenance, to ensure you’re assessing the full picture.
Some vendors require custom coding or scripting to develop case management applications from scratch—either via the solution provider or your in-house developers. On the plus side, custom-developed solutions can be tailored to your exact requirements. However, these applications typically take longer to build (equating to more costs, time and resources), are more challenging to upgrade and become more difficult to change over time.
Other vendors offer point solutions specific to one process. These offerings are often feature-rich and effective for one use case. However, they can’t be easily adapted, extended or connected to other areas of your organization, resulting in dreaded information silos. So, if you anticipate needing to grow your solution or pursue other applications down the road, niche applications might not be your best bet.
Alternatively, you can partner with a vendor that offers a low-code platform to configure case management applications. This minimizes the need for costly, time-consuming custom development with straightforward configuration via tools like checkboxes and drop-down menus. (It’s a bonus if the platform also offers frameworks that provide a starting point for solution creation.) Benefits include faster rollout of applications to more quickly meet end user needs. Point-and-click configuration also allows you to more easily adapt existing applications and add additional applications over time as requirements change, all on the same platform.
Finally, you’ll want to ask whether your vendor offers options to deploy solutions on-premises and in the cloud—giving you ultimate flexibility.
2. How Do You Handle Content?
In case management solutions, content is king—and content comes in a variety of formats depending on the case. The way your solution provider views and manages that content has a large impact on deployment and maintenance, knowledge worker accessibility, decision support and ultimately customer service.
In The Forrester Wave™: Dynamic Case Management, Q1 2016, author Craig Le Clair pointed out the treatment of case-related content as a solution provider differentiator:
“Providers fall into two camps: those that view enterprise content management (ECM) and unstructured content as front and center and those that treat it as just another data type. … The takeaway? In evaluating vendors, determine how important capture, records management, and content analytics are to your use case.”
If your case management needs involve content in any way, shape or form, you’ll want to figure out whether your prospective vendor falls into the first “camp”—allowing you to seamlessly connect and manage important supporting content alongside the critical data and process components of a case.
The right solution should handle all variations in content and provide an easy way to get the right content to the right knowledge worker at the right time. More than just a static case folder “attached” to the case, you’ll want to put your content to work, allowing it to drive decisions, transition cases between statuses and foster effective collaboration, especially when bolstered by underlying automation and capture capabilities. When you manage case-related content in a central repository, you can even create virtual views that change based on case status and user role.
Finally, check whether a potential vendor offers secure cloud-based file sharing capabilities, which can extend the value of your case-driven content and solutions to customers, clients, vendors or others outside your organization.
3. How Flexible and Scalable is Your Platform?
Case work, by nature, is subject to change. Your customers’ requirements shift; your business needs evolve; rules and regulations change; and as you track work in your case management solution, you’ll likely see opportunities for improvement along the way.
The ability to easily make those changes is key. An effective solution allows you to easily add more users, add different process steps and even allow end users to impact the status and flow of cases themselves.
Next, determine the extent that a potential vendor will allow you to maximize your case management investment beyond a single solution. The value of case management is only multiplied when you can leverage the same platform and underlying capabilities for applications across your organization.
In fact, Forrester asserts in The Forrester Wave™: Dynamic Case Management, Q1 2016 report that more than half of the enterprises it speaks to have at least two dynamic case management deployments on the same platform—a number that has continued to increase since 2013.
4. What’s Your Track Record Across Industries?
Whether you’re a financial institution, university, healthcare system, manufacturer, insurance company or any other organization, case management capabilities can deliver great value via both industry-specific solutions (e.g., fraud investigation, student incident tracking and claims processing) and back office scenarios (e.g., HR onboarding, project management, contract management, and compliance).
Make sure that your vendor has the industry expertise required to develop a tailored solution to your business problems, including relevant customer references.
Finally, be sure to ask about any industry and analyst recognition and customer awards—all of which can tell you a great deal about the solution provider’s experience and strengths.
OnBase is a single enterprise information platform for managing content, processes and cases. Providing enterprise content management (ECM), case management, business process management (BPM), enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) and capture all on a single platform, OnBase transforms organizations around the world by empowering them to become more agile, efficient and effective. Learn more at OnBase.com.