Document management / ECM software
Focus your document searches on what you are looking for (procurement request, purchase order, supplier, customer, contract etc.) and not where it is stored!
Need to improve your performance?
Need to secure your sensitive data?
Need to improve your information exchange and sharing?
Need space, and to get rid of your paper archives?
Need to satisfy regulatory requirements?
Or just need to save money?
Why choose an ECM solution?
Choose an ECM (Enterprise Content Management) solution and don’t wait for a REASON to take your decision. We see all too often that the decision to deploy an ECM solution is due to a problem of information management, such as:
The inability to find information,
- Putting together a complete file (on a customer, service provider, employee, incident etc.) within a reasonable time,
- Simply finding a document in a collection that is much too large.
Lost productivity,
- With a multitude of documents to manage, distribute and store, the time wasted searching for information is a critical factor in improving productivity.
Lack of exchange and traceability
- The introduction of remote working, the need for communication between departments when managing a customer’s case and regulations that can be demanding in terms of traceability are daily obstacles to better collaboration.
What is ECM:
ECM (Enterprise Content Management) covers all the processes and techniques used to manage an organization’s flows of incoming documents, documents passing through workflows (document processes) and outgoing documents.
An ECM system offers several essential functions:
Document acquisition and scanning
The creation of a digital document may result from an automatic process (direct creation in digital form using business or office software) or from scanning paper documents, possibly with OCR processing to enable full-text searching in the document’s contents.
Processing and the classification scheme
This stage involves classifying, referencing and indexing the digital document, describing:
- Business indexes (metaproperties) to facilitate classification and searching (document type: invoice, order; the customer concerned etc.),
- Technical indexes for traceability (creation date, time stamp, version number, author etc.),
- Access rights (editing, reading, confidential etc.).
Document storage and conservation
This essential function makes it possible to conserve a large volume of documents and ensure they remain reliable over time while enabling rapid access in accordance with the security rules specified for the system
Collaboration and distribution
One of the major functions of the ECM system is its ability share documents between multiple users, who can edit them and receive them at precise points as part of a given process for a defined action based on predefined rights.
Archiving and destruction
Documents reaching the end of their life (statutory period, obsolescence etc.) can be removed from the ECM system or transferred to a legal archiving system for conservation.
An ECM system provides many benefits to any organization, regardless of its size:
A reduction in processing costs through quick and simple access to information: the right document for the right person at the right time.
Standardized document management thanks to classification schemes and indexing based on business needs.
Better collaboration and document sharing between colleagues.
Better document governance within the organization thanks to secure access control, traceability and workflows for validation and distribution. A document repository that is available, accessible and up to date.
An ECM solution enables you to use all your documents to the full, simplifies your everyday work and strengthens your information handling procedures.
Convinced? Then let’s see how you begin an ECM project
It should be kept in mind that a project to implement an ECM solution is also an organizational project, in which the involvement of senior management, the IT department and operational departments is essential for success.
Beginning an ECM project with a business-centered approach
Rather than starting with an overall approach, it is often preferable to begin by segmenting by activity sector (rather than by department, which would limit its use to a specific department), opening the ECM solution to further sectors over time, so that ultimately the solution is a cross-cutting ECM system for all the organization’s activities. For example, start with an “invoicing” ECM system or a “customer” ECM system.
More generally, EFALIA solutions address different challenges for different needs:
This step-by-step approach, deploying separately for individual activity sectors, provides the following advantages:
- The ECM project is quicker to implement: under two to three months, rather than six to twelve months, and can be delivered in SaaS mode,
- Change management is simplified, because users are working in a familiar business environment,
- Managing access rights is easier, because they are defined for each activity sector, while enabling all the different departments involved to be made aware.
Examples of activity-based ECM:
- Finance ECM (invoices, purchase orders, delivery notes, …),
- HR ECM (employee files, training, …),
- Quality ECM (procedures, complaints, …),
- Correspondence ECM (linked to correspondence software).
Deploying interdisciplinary ECM
An interdisciplinary ECM system enables all departments and users to access a single document repository organized by activity sector, in contrast to isolated document silos in business software applications. Interdisciplinary ECM thus allows users to access all the documents that make up a file in a single place, without necessarily needing to open the applications that manage them. For example, an invoice issued by the finance and administration department can be accessed by the various operational departments so that payment can be authorized.
On the other hand, in this new interdisciplinary ECM context, the solution must expose a web service API and connectors for linking the ECM platform to external applications.
An interdisciplinary ECM system provides:
A 360° view of the organization’s documents,
A single user interface for rapid adoption,
Reduced costs
by sharing the investment in the software and the costs of training, configuration and maintenance
