Content In Context
The need for knowledge to be delivered in context is well understood. Organizations are seeing the benefit of delivering that content in enterprise and Web-based applications. The benefits are apparent in a number of ways—instant look ups, litigation management, improved content updates and content automation are a few examples.
When organizations perform business processes such as processing invoices, employee benefits or customer orders, people need to verify information. Looking at an employee benefits election form, we might want to verify which program an employee chose, or how much income he selected to put into a healthcare account. These look-up processes often result in walking down a hallway and pulling out a piece of paper from a file cabinet, which is time-consuming compared to having the content electronically and having a hot link from the employee record. But what about when you want to view all your invoices from a certain month, or from a certain group of vendors? Hand gathering that information is extremely time-consuming compared to running an electronic search. This is one of the reasons many organizations have moved away from paper-based processes to electronic processes. And because electronic representations of documents can exist anywhere, these processes can also be executed by employees who work remotely.
But getting that information into the system electronically can be the biggest time-saver. We often see organizations cut costs 90% by moving from paper-based processes to electronic processes for capturing invoice information, for example. And not only is the information processed faster, it is more accurate. According to Thomas Redman, in an article from Information Management magazine called “Data, An Unfolding Quality Disaster:” “If bad data impacts an operation only 5% of the time, it adds a staggering 45% to the cost of operations.”
Use-Cases Tell the Story
Friesland Foods has been in business for more than 125 years, during which time the company has developed into a leading producer and supplier of dairy products, fruit-based drinks and ingredients. Friesland Foods develops, produces and sells natural, nutritional and high-quality dairy products, fruit-based drinks and ingredients in western and central Europe, southeast Asia, West Africa and the Middle East. Friesland needed to provide a solution to capture all electronic documents involved with the supply of foodstuffs to meet European regulations, linking together all records by customer and supplier with full version control, security and records management.
Friesland Foods integrated content management with Oracle E-Business Suite to provide the relationship between the supplier contract, order schedules and shipment notes. With this system, Friesland Foods can see a complete audit trail for each supplier order through to delivery to its customers. All documents now have full records and retention policies for storage and ease of access in the future, and also from other applications such as a supplier portal.
Embry Riddle Aeronautical University has also integrated its content management with E-Business Suite to automate invoice processing. But it is also integrating content management into its “e-campus” solutions to help manage student admissions. Embry Riddle is able to gather all student information for the admissions process, including reference letters, transcripts and military documentation for each student, and then evaluate the student for admissions. By improving turnaround, Embry Riddle is able to accept the top candidates while other institutions are still gathering information, giving them a competitive advantage to attract the best students.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs needed to provide a collaborative website that provided fast content updates. The 564 federally recognized tribes can now interact more effectively with the two million Indians who are members of registered tribes. Updating information and content used to be centralized and took more than a day. This is now managed by staff across the country and can be updated in minutes. Collaboration among the 10,000 BIA and 70,000 Department of the Interior employees can now be done via an intranet instead of purely through fax, phone or hard copy. Content that used to be redundant, irrelevant and spread across 500 categories is now properly managed, secure and searchable in 30 categories with tagging. Formerly, staff gathering information used email and phone for social networking to find subject matter. BIA has provided its IT infrastructure a better way to support its stakeholders and now has a secure and manageable way to better serve its constituents.
Oracle’s Enterprise Content Management
Oracle has introduced revolutionary one-click Web content management with the release of Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite 11g. Developers can drag content management services into any existing Web application, enabling content areas that your users can update with one click. This innovative approach breaks the cycle of emailing content updates to the Web development team, and having them paste content in-line with code. By enabling content editors direct access for content updates, organizations are more agile and responsive to market changes and customer demands. Subject matter experts make updates right in the context of the website, improving accuracy and productivity. Through a standards-based and open architecture, the ability to drag and drop these services into existing Web applications is unique to Oracle.
All Web content is under full content management, enabling reuse, de-duplication and lifecycle management. Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite is a complete offering with document management, digital asset management, imaging and records management—all built on one repository.
Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite is integrated with enterprise applications such as E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel and JD Edwards. Content associated with customer, employee or supplier records can be checked in or scanned and managed, accessible directly from those records. Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite is also integrated with other content management and file sharing systems to enable searching, managing and performing records management functions such as instant holds and dispositions on physical and remote electronic records from a single administrative interface.
For additional information, visit www.oracle.com/goto/ecm.