Docuware Document Management - Khwezi Holdings (Pty) Ltd

An enterprise content management (ECM) system can significantly improve business efficiency, reduce costs and increase employee and customer satisfaction. ECM software brings measurable value to almost any department within a company: accounting, human resources, sales, legal and more can all benefit.

If you’re not yet making use of these rapidly growing technology tools in your business, now is the time to consider them. Learn more about enterprise content management solutions below.

What is enterprise content management?

Modern technology terminology can be confusing, and “enterprise content management” remains an unfamiliar term for some. Let’s define it.

Enterprise content management is an umbrella term for processes and technologies that support businesses in capturing, storing, delivering and using essential information. Such information can be customer demographics, order histories, patient medical records or market research. The people receiving the data can range from employees and internal stakeholders to customers and business partners.

Simply put, enterprise content management (ECM) digitises, controls and automates the flow of unstructured information within a company, which is the messy information that exists outside structured database environments. For example:

send a message

request a call back

Structured Data

Corporate financial records inside an ERP or finance application (like Sage or QuickBooks)
Employee data inside a human resources planning application (like Oracle PeopleSoft or Workday)
Customer data inside a CRM (like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics)

Un-Structured Data

Incoming invoices, packing slips or bills of lading.
Resumes, tax documents and certifications.
Emails, photographs or meeting notes

Typically, ECM systems handle the capture, reading and indexing of information; provide opportunities to annotate, edit or improve the information; and offer robust workflow and automation tools to ensure that information gets to the right people at the right time.

Documents are available from anywhere, and security and compliance are safeguarded. Even mobile users have access to all necessary data, allowing multiple employees to access the same document in parallel. In addition, with robust audit logging and analytics capabilities, organisations have a record of who accessed, changed or removed documents and when.

These document management capabilities are enhanced by digital workflow automation. Digital workflow enables an organisation to establish predictable, repeatable, measurable processes that remove the need for manual data entry and eliminate the possibility of losing information.

What is the difference between ECM and document management?

The term “document management system” (DMS) is often used interchangeably with “enterprise content management,” but this usage is misleading.

The easiest way to think about document management is as a subset of the broader ECM capability set. Document management covers many of the core features such as capturing, indexing, archiving, automating and controlling information, but typically only with respect to the information found in documents.

A complete ECM system might manage information from web content, social media accounts, and other highly dynamic and scalable information sources that are outside the boundaries of a document. For larger organisations, this can be immensely valuable. For many smaller organisations, document management may suffice.

It is important to note that “Enterprise Content Management” is not only valuable for large companies.

The value of ECM can be realised in organisations of any size, despite the leading word.

In a nutshell Enterprise Content Management includes the following “out-the-box” capabilities

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Its flexibility in deployment and configuration ensures the perfect fit for your business.

Standard Capabilities

Intelligent Indexing

Workflow management

Task Management

Document import

Electronic Signatures

Teams Integration

Electronic Forms

Outlook Integration

Generic email integration

One-Click integration

Index data export

Data synchronisation

iPaas connections

How to Implement Enterprise content management

How to implement an enterprise content management system

One of the most important best practices for enterprise content management is taking the time to properly implement your solution. The following 10 steps help ensure organisations choose the right ECM, communicate the change to employees and other stakeholders and actually address business needs with the software.

1. Review ECM software options and decide on a solution

Leverage free demos and  product trials to learn more about the contenders. Use the data you’ve collected to make a checklist defining your needs and must-haves. Assign members of the project team to evaluate solutions on the market and present those that  best meet your needs. 

Decide whether you want to implement a cloud or on-premises solution. Your decision will be based on many factors including your organisation’s IT infrastructure, the potential cost of upgrading your hardware, and the bandwidth and expertise of your IT team.

Approach your top choices and ask for pricing information and ask for anything else you need to make a final decision. Then making the right choice should be clear.

2. Get buy-in from critical stakeholders

Bring your analysis to critical stakeholders, such as an executive board. The goal of this step is to demonstrate the need for the ECM system with actual projections and numbers, illustrating potential ROI, as well as to confirm the suitability of your chosen solution.

Once your solution is given the go ahead, you can begin to draft and deliver communication about the upcoming change to others. The goal isn’t to overwhelm people with details about a change that hasn’t yet arrived but to prepare them with logical reasons that the change is necessary. Proactively communicating about any type of tech implementation helps generate future buy-in at every level, which is important to success.

3 Form a project team

Start by pulling together a team of stakeholders and subject matter experts who can help you implement an enterprise content management solution. Some people you choose for the team might include:

Tech leadership and experts from the IT department, especially if you need to integrate the ECM with existing systems
Managers and employees from various departments who will play a role in implementing the ECM software or benefit from it, including human resources, training, sales, customer service and accounting
At least one stakeholder who can champion the project; typically, this would be someone from executive leadership
Experts from areas that may need to have oversight of how the tool is implemented and used, such as your compliance or legal teams

4. Use your solution provider as a resource

Once you choose a vendor, take advantage of the expertise they’ve gained by working on many other implementations. The best solution providers are knowledgeable, highly responsive and provide ongoing support.

5. Define your current position and develop future goals

Work together as a team to produce two deliverables in the early stage of the project:

A current state process map that details how work is done now
A future state process map that details how you want work to be done

Taking time to understand your business processes and planning ahead helps you create an implementation process that supports minimal business interruption.

6. Create a roadmap to get from your current to future state

Spend time determining what changes need to be made to get from the current state to the future state. Create a list of those changes ranked by priority. Then you can develop a step-by-step roadmap for your project.

7. Create policies and procedures

While the technical work is being done to integrate the ECM system into your operation, ensure someone is creating policies and procedures for the use of the software. Documents you may want to create include:

Access policies that define who has access to what in the ECM system
Security protocols that define how you plan to protect data in the system and what you expect of employees in this regard
Workflow procedures that define how documents enter the system, what is done with the information in the system and who is responsible for various tasks
Knowledge management and training documents that will help teams roll out the new software as seamlessly as possible

8. Train your administrators and power users

Armed with this documentation in hand, begin training your administrators and power users. These users can put the system through all its paces during testing time. During that time, glitches and concerns can be addressed quickly and without upsetting overall productivity.

9. Test and fine-tune

If you’re implementing ECM software one department at a time, you might have a small team of testers from the department you’re currently implementing in. If you plan to implement the solution across the enterprise, recruit testers from every functional unit you can. They’ll all be concerned about different aspects of the system. It’s tempting to choose the best and brightest to test your system. And while your top employees may certainly be likely to spot important issues and communicate them to the team, it’s also a good idea to include other employees to ensure the system works well for everyone.

10. Implement the ECM system across your department or enterprise

Once any issues identified by software testers have been corrected, begin rolling the ECM system out across the department or company. Make sure to include plenty of time for training to ensure the highest levels of buy-in.

Document management FAQs

What does document management software do?

Document management software captures, manages, retrieves and stores documents in electronic format. It is defined as the digital representation and secure storage of documents so that businesses can achieve new levels of speed, accuracy and transparency while creating a predictable, reliable, repeatable information infrastructure.

These solutions should be able to integrate with other systems, including email, ERP, accounting or customer relationship management systems. These integrations help you develop and automate workflows that involve documents and allow employees to access documents as needed to perform their work.

What’s the difference between document management and enterprise content management?

If document management software specialises in capturing, storing and automating document flow within business processes, enterprise content management (ECM) describes software that extends beyond that: including web content management, social content management and other enterprise capabilities fall in this bucket.

Typically, ECM is deployed within large enterprises, as licenses and configuration are complicated, costly and time-consuming to deploy. Thus, ECM is not a good fit for small and mid-size businesses that need basic document management.

Why do I need document management software?

Completely obsolete, is expensive and difficult to maintain. It can require costly file storage space. Moreover, an employee has to file the paper, and another staff member has to spend time retrieving it when they need the information. Paper is also tied to manual processes that contribute to higher costs, decreased efficiency and more errors. Document management software, on the other hand, provides you with options for digital storage and retrieval, automated workflow, data security and compliance measures.

What is a document management plan?

A document management plan is a written record of how you manage your documents — both paper and electronic. It might include:

Where and how documents are stored
Under what circumstances documents can be archived
Under what circumstances documents can be altered and how you manage version control when that happens
Under what circumstances documents can be deleted and what record of their existence remains
Who has access to various documents
Which people have access to various documents
How document workflows function
How documents are captured and enter your system

What kinds of businesses can benefit from document management software?

Almost any business can benefit from some type of document management system. When it comes to document management software, there are options to support businesses across all types of industries.

Khwezi’s document management has solutions for finance and accounting businesses, sales and marketing teams, healthcare organisations, manufacturing and many others.

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Enterprise Content Management (ECM)