It is All About Knowing Your Customer
If you are like many other businesses, you have spent millions of dollars implementing robust ERP solutions, upgrading your computers and networks, investing in e-commerce and even increasing your Internet connectivity. You have archived every single business transaction in your SAP R/3 system, recorded every customer inquiry in your Clarify CRM, captured every e-mail, even scanned and indexed every piece of correspondence.
So, what overall business value has your organization gained? More importantly, when do you expect to see a return on your investments, if any?
The most valuable business content in the New Economy continues to be about the customer. Knowing everything about your customer not only improves your existing service level but also opens new revenue opportunities. Achieving these business goals would require reorganizing millions of business objects in the form of "electronic content."
So how do you get to know everything about your customer?
By definition, content is your customers', partners' and employees' unified view of the disparate sets of information normally stored and managed by disconnected business applications, from ERP to imaging systems.
Traditionally, Electronic Document Management (EDM) implementations (using imaging, document and workflow) focus on the departmental or micro-level resolution to specific business problems, with little or no emphasis on the Internet, personalization or collaboration. Although the Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) solutions do provide improved interaction over the Internet, they are lacking in business process management, audit and security. Finally, the Web Content Management (WCM) implementations are primarily targeted at the HTML and related Web content, with very little, if any, interface with the real business applications.
However, the creation of a high-performance back-office content management system is a complex undertaking that cannot be accomplished in any reasonable time frame by developers looking to integrate EDM, EIP and WCM solutions from multiple vendors.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) (such as the solution provided by Softheon) represents a platform-level convergence of these three technologies.
An ECM solution should provide many important features, including:
The acquiring and indexing of business documents of all types regardless of their source or format.
A Content Repository should be capable of accessing any other business application or knowledge repository regardless of the source, making documents from disparate systems available from the user screen or portal. Document objects of various types that relate to a single customer or business partner are accessible from the metadata index and are linked in a "virtual electronic folder" as necessary, including legacy and client/server computer-generated data documents, Web content, text, e-mail and scanned images.
A partner relationship management portal should allow business partners to access all documents relevant to the sales process. This includes product data and specifications, proposals, price lists, invoices, inventory status, order status, commission reports, contracts and other sales material. This content is linked to the Customer Relationship Management system for one-stop partner support.
Unified access to content from disparate sources, including ERP, CRM and legacy.
It should be possible to view or print documents anywhere, regardless of the device or location. For example, with Softheon software the user can transform documents from the repository for the Web on the fly without programming (including image documents, text documents and computer-based) into all-points-addressable data stream formats such as PCL, IBM AFP and Xerox/Metacode/DJDE.
Federated searching and linking of different document types in the repository without requiring the user to return to application-specific retrieval screens is crucial to effective ECM systems.
The ability to enable secure and personalized access with extensive audit trails.
Document-level security, coupled with metadata, is vital to protecting critical business content. For example, "Insurance Agent A" should not be able to access "Insurance Agent B's" customer policies or statements. Robust document security should also link to the personalization server to further ensure only authorized access to the documents.
A long-term regulatory compliant storage and archival.
ECM should provide a long-term history available for customer service, legal, accounting, and a business intelligence function long after the business content is generated. Softheon hierarchically archives all documents on magnetic disk, tape and optical-based media, throughout the document life cycle.
The ability to augment and streamline existing business processes.
Integrated ad-hoc and production workflow through ECM automatically controls and routes all business content throughout a department or enterprise, ensuring that there is no time lag in the completion of a process (problem escalation and resolution, management approval, routing). Workflow rules should be easily implemented using a graphical interface.
While many organizations are striving to improve customer service, the successful ones will thrive and differentiate themselves from their competition by extending the traditional content and business processes to their customers, employees, partners and suppliers. In turn, the stronger customer, supplier and partner relationship translates to reduced operating cost, streamlined processes and improved profitability—the operational excellence.