How ECM is The Key to Controlling The Tide of Information

Information is the lifeblood of countless business decisions. Still, as organizations scale and information accumulates, it can become challenging to manage, leading to bottlenecks, security concerns, collaboration issues, and other costly inefficiencies. Ensuring information flows freely throughout your business is essential for productive processes, but implementing a system to facilitate this flow takes time, resources, and, ultimately, investments.

Below is an excerpt from Square 9’s Enterprise Content Management (ECM) guide detailing what ECM is, how it differs from document management, and how it can help your business operate more securely, collaboratively, and efficiently. For more strategies, insights, and details on starting your organization’s ECM transformation, check out Your Complete Guide to Enterprise Content Management.

What is an Enterprise Content Management System?

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) refers to the solutions used by organizations to capture, manage, store, and deliver information in a structured and organized manner. ECM aims to facilitate the creation, collaboration, distribution, and retrieval of information across your organization, ensuring that the right individuals have access to the right information at the right time.

ECM vs Document Management Systems

ECM and document management are closely linked. After all, much of the information organizations manage on a daily basis is contained in documents. But while document management solutions only assist with the challenges of document images, enterprise content management helps manage content of various types and leverages the information within this content and your document images to create further efficiencies and automation opportunities.

Why Invest in Your ECM Strategy?

With the adoption of automation tools and solutions on the rise, many companies are making ECM a part of their broader strategies to help with compliance, risk, cost reduction, productivity, collaboration, and customer service.

With growing economic pressures and a far more competitive labor market, many organizations continue doubling their investments in intelligent information management solutions like enterprise content management. This trend can be summed up with the following statistics from AIIM:

• The average number of information management systems within an organization has risen from 3.14 to 4.95.

• Almost two-thirds (65%) of organizations have achieved significant digital transformation, up from 46% in 2018.

• Information management (20%) and information governance (16%) are the top skills organizations, departments, and individuals from all demographics require.
  

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Benefits

Effective enterprise content management offers organizations a slew of benefits, including:

Increased Security and Compliance

With regular audits that call for documents and personal information that must be safeguarded, organizations frequently implement enterprise content management solutions to automate document retention, provide convenient access to records during audits, and restrict access to protected information to only those trained and authorized to handle it.

Reduced Costs and Increased Productivity

The costs of paper, ink, toner, on and off-site storage, printer rental, and maintenance add up to an absorbent amount that could be sidestepped entirely. Combined with productivity increases that save paid hours on document retrieval, collaboration efforts, data entry, and more, the savings become even more apparent.

Improved Collaboration

The presence of multiple file versions can often be confusing, and disjointed processes for passing off documents to approvers and other collaborators can lead to severe bottlenecks. Automated document routing, version control, and tools for approvals, redactions, and other collaboration efforts ensure your organization can work collectively and efficiently.

Enhanced Customer Service 

When information is time-consuming to retrieve, customers are often left waiting for answers. By providing readily available access to countless records, your team can be ready to field any questions that come their way.

Summary

Enterprise Content Management captures, stores, manages, and delivers information throughout your organization, leveraging it for enhanced security, compliance, collaboration, and efficiency. By investing in ECM solutions, organizations can direct information in a structured and organized manner leading to more informed business decisions and paving the way for further automation.

Square 9 is a leading provider of AI-powered intelligent information management solutions that take the paper out of work and make it easier to get things done. With digital workflows that automate many aspects of how you work today, we make it easy by extracting information from scans or PDFs, storing documents in a searchable archive, and building digital twins of your current processes through graphical workflows.