Conquering Business Challenges with ECM: The Agile and Efficient Corporation

In today’s information economy, content is more dynamic, more complex, and shared by more people throughout the enterprise than ever before. A desire to leverage this content across the enterprise and with customers is no longer a nicety for competitive differentiation—it is now a requirement of doing business. The challenge of managing content across the enterprise has become increasingly clear—as well as the necessity and benefit of integrating that content with business processes.

Most recently, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) emerged as the definitive term to describe the next evolution in the document and content technologies market. Within ECM, the business requirements of the entire enterprise are considered, including business processes and the key role of unstructured content in business. ECM solutions promise to deliver what other previous technologies could not—substantial business value.

ECM Delivers Business Value

As more enterprises look to the Web to conduct their business, ECM solutions become even more critical. In order to stay competitive, enterprises must improve their business processes on the Web by making what happens behind the click more effective and efficient. ECM technologies offer enterprises the ability to streamline business processes, link people who participate in those processes via the Web, and leverage unstructured content as a strategic asset.

“Organizations that can best leverage their intellectual assets (i.e., content) will be best positioned to run efficiently (e.g., avoid duplicated efforts, exploiting best practices, identifying/leveraging subject matter experts, exposing the information employees, partners, and consumers need to make decisions); those not moving into this model will increasingly be at a competitive disadvantage,” claims Andy Warzecha, senior analyst at the META Group.1

Most enterprises reap substantial benefits when they incorporate the Web into their business by exposing parts of their business processes and relevant information to participants in their business operations. For instance, when a policyholder participates in the claims process by providing information necessary to move the claim toward resolution, the organization benefits from a lower transaction cost and increased customer satisfaction. It also makes sense for an insurance company to allow others, such as agents or business partners, to participate in the claims process. Exposing business processes to both the policyholder as well as other parties, and incorporating unstructured content, such as scanned police reports, photographs from claims adjustors or e-mail correspondence with agents and policyholders, dramatically improves the efficiency of the claims process.

ECM tools ensure that business-critical information is delivered to the right people at the right time. Business processes within an enterprise are not hindered, and unstructured content and sources of information are integrated in a holistic, single view, providing the opportunity to make valuable business decisions.

Role of Process Management

As Web-enabled business practices and process, plus unstructured content become more complex, key demands such as the need for centrally managed, enterprisewide content management will continue to sustain the ECM market. Additionally, today’s enterprises are recognizing the need for more elaborate workflow or eProcess and business process management features found in ECM solutions. Enterprises that once concentrated on building a Web site quickly realized the inadequacy of WCM systems, and that having a Web front alone was not enough. To compensate, significant resources were spent to develop custom workflow and Business Process Management solutions to support growing business requirements. This need for a less costly, more complete package solution is driving demand for ECM offerings.

In today’s environment, competitive companies must remain agile—quick to adapt. Flexibility for changing business needs and evolving business practices will continue to be a market driver. Market leaders in the ECM arena include traditional document and content management vendors, as well as a number of new players. According to IDC’s ranking of worldwide content and document application software vendors, FileNET is recognized as the market leader, eclipsing the next largest vendor in revenue by more than 50%.2 The ranking reviews revenue and market share for 1998 to 2000.

When ECM Makes Sense for Your Business

Requirements for an ECM solution depend on the specific business challenges of an enterprise. A thorough assessment of an enterprise’s specific business processes or application is necessary before undertaking an ECM system. Ask yourself the following questions to determine if your organization could benefit from an ECM solution:

• Does your enterprise execute business processes, and more importantly exceptions, in a well-organized, efficient manner?;

• Does your organization effectively use the information it collects via the Web or in paper form by delivering it to the appropriate people in a format they can easily and quickly use?;

• Is your enterprise able to bring together information from various sources such as correspondences sent in by the customer, statements, and information exchanged between businesses, and make it available in a timely manner to the appropriate people within your organization?;

• If the Web plays a role in your business, do you allow external participants to interact in your business processes?;

If the above questions are issues that you struggle with today, a well-implemented ECM software offering can deliver real answers to your business requirements. ECM enables enterprises to adapt faster to the growing business need for dealing with valuable content. As the speed of business transactions and volume of content continue to accelerate, enterprises must act quickly, and explore ECM initiatives to stay competitive.

FileNET delivers the Substance Behind eBusiness™ by optimizing an organization’s business processes and associated content to deliver a competitive advantage, maximum efficiency and increased profitability. For more information on FileNET's business process management solutions, visit www.FileNET.com

1 META Group Electronic Business Strategies, Enterprise Content Management, March 5, 2001

2 IDC Document and Content Technologies Market Forecast and Analyst Summary, 2001-2005, August 2001

Enabling a “Work Anywhere” Business Model

Interpolis N.V., one the largest insurers in The Netherlands, has based much of its success on its pioneering “work anywhere” business model - where every employee is expected to be able to work from any location with no designated desk or work area. This forward thinking management approach required a commitment to implement the technology necessary to make the model work. The most critical of these technologies was FileNET’s enterprise content management solution with easy network-based access and full cross-indexing capabilities to minimize content retrieval time.

The Challenge

With international operations in Luxembourg, Ireland and Portugal and an employment force of nearly 5,000, Interpolis offers a wide range of life, health, and property and casualty insurance plans. The company boasts total annual revenue exceeding $3.5 billion and $13 billion in assets under management. Along with this size has come a proportionally sized - and growing - stack of paper documents. The company recently estimated that if their documents were placed in a single pile, that pile would reach a height of 9.3 miles. The problems this paper resource presented included its management cost, a figure rapidly approaching the $2 million mark, and the fact that retrieving documents was becoming increasingly difficult and time-consuming.

Realizing that these issues would only increase because the volume of documents was growing at the rate of 20 percent each year, Interpolis looked to minimize their content management costs and improve their “work anywhere” operation model.

The FileNET Solution

After reviewing a wide range of content management solutions, Interpolis selected a suite of FileNET enterprise content management products, including Panagon Capture Professional, Panagon IDM Web Desktop and Panagon Visual WorkFlo. The selection was based on the breadth of the Panagon offerings that will allow them to seamlessly enhance their enterprise content management solution as requirements change. Equally important was the fact that the solution is Internet-based and therefore supports access by any authorized employee, in any country.

Another benefit of the Panagon choice was its support for Extensible Markup Language (XML) industry standards. The Panagon solution makes it possible to support any document database Interpolis might create in the future, as well as those systems of companies that it may merge with or acquire.

Interpolis’ enterprise content management solution stores paper documents, photographs, audio recordings, video images and images created in a wide range of office productivity applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook.

The Bottom Line

Besides eliminating paper documents, improving the productivity of its work-anywhere staff, and slashing overhead costs, the Panagon solution also is enabling Interpolis to maintain a far more comprehensive content repository than its previous paper-based system allowed.

The benefits of the company’s content management solution are so comprehensive that Interpolis established a repository with a capacity of more than 70 million documents that will be rolled out, enterprise-wide, to more than 3000 employees. When the roll-out is complete, the insurer projects saving of $1 million in costs previously allocated for maintaining its paper-based resource, and another $500,000 annually in productivity savings attributable to an elimination of wait-time for employees to retrieve needed documents - a total return on investment of $1.5 million per year. Other productivity savings accrue due to Interpolis’ unprecedented ability to link documents to multiple files with hyperlinks. In addition, any single document can now be used concurrently by any number of staff requiring access to its contents. In the company’s former, paper-based approach, this was not possible.

In summary, the FileNet >enterprise content management solution has empowered Interpolis to meet its objectives of streamlining content management and access, minimizing the overhead costs of doing so, and dramatically enhancing the capabilities of its “work anywhere” operational model.