BOOST YOUR BUSINESS WITH ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) consists of the strategies and methods used to manage and interpret documents related to work in an organization.

In today’s information age, the success and failure of an enterprise is dictated primarily by two factors – the rate of influx of data into an enterprise database and the constant interpreting and evaluation of this data into logical information as input for strategic planning.

As unstructured content is checked in and out of a system, each use can potentially add to the content's profile. With time, the ECM system might gradually adopt new filtering, which assists in making better decisions, determining the relevance of information and documents.

For example, in order to improve efficiency while still adhering to Federal Laws and guidelines, an eminent South Western US University turned to implement Enterprise Content Management. The university used ECM to bring business processes together and accelerate information exchange. This solution not only helped the university to ensure efficient administration, it also minimized the impact on staff—improving productivity and reducing costs.

According to the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), Enterprise Content Management can be broken down into five major components:

• Capture: Obtain and organize information.
• Manage: Process and employ information as per requirement.
• Store: Temporary back up of transient information.
• Preserve: More permanent storage of unchanging data.
• Deliver: Provide clients and end users with requested data and analyses.

While identifying a direct return on investment can be difficult, it is possible to see the impacts of the improved process efficiency. With the enforced usage of these tools within the organization, they become part of the work culture. What's the ROI on a fax-machine? Virtually negligible, per se. However, who can imagine running an organization without one?

It's not enough to simply maintain and hold extensive database information. Content must be managed so that it can be used to achieve business goals, which is the goal behind implementation of Enterprise Content Management.

News from the Central VA Laserfiche User Group

In Central Virginia, ECM is moving right along! In fact, the Central Virginia Regional Enterprise content management system company Laserfiche User Group, is meeting at the Albemarle County Office Building. This meeting will feature speakers from the Library of Virginia, who will give a presentation and field questions about ECM records for local governments and state agencies.

Training will cover electronic records, both scanned documents as well as other enterprise content management stored records (such as databases, Word files, Excel, etc). Retention and destruction requirements and using the retention schedules will all be included as well.

One of our members, Corey Smith, from the Library of Virginia, has provided some information that provides excellent background and will help everyone attending come prepared with specific, pertinent questions.

Corey says:

“As your primary interest is with electronic records that are scanned and in a database, I would like to mention that records follow the same retention period regardless of format. Caveats come into play as retention periods differ and some records may not be the best candidate for a particular format. For example, a record with a 50 yr retention would not be recommended to kept on a CD. The life expectancy of a CD is only 20 yrs. Because of this, anything with a permanent retention or with a long retention would not be recommended for a CD format.

“On the LVA Website, you can access our updated Electronic Records Guidelines that can hopefully provide some additional information for your benefit.

“To give you an idea of what’s considered personal identifying information, under section “C” of 18.2-186.3 in the Code of Virginia, it defines certain types of personal identifying information.”

If you’re in the Central Virginia area, we hope to see you at our User Group meeting!

Our Agenda:

• Welcome/introductions
• Group business & info
• Lightning Talks (Mini-Success Stories) – each person has up to 3 minutes to talk about something cool they learned or did with Laserfiche recently
• Library of Virginia presentation, followed by questions from attendees

Flexible Enterprise Content Management Solutions for Your Industry

Many organizations hesitate to implement ECM solutions because of the problems of implementing best practices and standardizing operations enterprise-wide. Each department, each regional office and each workgroup has its own ways of doing business, and they often fear it will force them to change the way they work. Information ends up in multiple locations, with no way for the central office to sort it all out. And the system ends up compounding the problems it was supposed to solve.

The Rio ECM system is different because it fits existing business processes into an enterprise framework. It gives people the control they need and the flexibility they want. Enterprise content management organically expands throughout organizations, regardless of the industry:

· State and Local Government

· Federal Government:

· Financial Services

· Health Care:

Enterprise content management offers organizations the strength of a proven information management system and the technology of a highly sophisticated business process management engine.

Enterprise Content Management System

According to AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) International, Enterprise Content Management or ECM is the collection of methods, strategies, and tools that are used to manage, capture, preserve or store, and deliver content matter and documents related to organizational processes. In other words,

content management suite is a computer application that lets you create, edit, publish or manipulate the content of a website.

It is generally used for the purpose of storing and retrieval of user manuals, news articles, brochures, guides and other technical data. The content can be in any form: audio, video, visual, text, spreadsheet, excel, word documents etc. The basic types of Content Management Suites include: Web, Enterprise and Component systems.

So if you are looking to introduce your business to the audience on World Wide Web, or perhaps have an existing website and feel that there is a need to update its looks, a content management suite can help you in achieving your target.

Prerequisites of a good Enterprise Content Management :

Content creators are the most important users of an enterprise management system. Everything within the system has to be analyzed cautiously to see different kind of effects they have on the work done by the content creators. These content creators require full access to all features of the ECM and ensure that it is setup appropriately and working all the time, whenever any user needs.

Enterprise content management systems ensure that all applications used in an organization deliver their content to a repository, which provides the information to various applications. An ideal ECM allows multiple users, technical and non-technical authorizations, capturing of meta data and has powerful linking capabilities. It also ensures non-stop flow of content. Enterprise content management software has become a necessity in the ever changing and highly competitive world of business. There are many firms that offer customized products and services to help you establish your business processes.

Flexible Enterprise Content Management Solutions for Your Industry

Many organizations hesitate to implement ECM solutions because of the problems of implementing best practices and standardizing operations enterprise-wide. Each department, each regional office and each workgroup has its own ways of doing business, and they often fear it will force them to change the way they work. Information ends up in multiple locations, with no way for the central office to sort it all out. And the system ends up compounding the problems it was supposed to solve.

The

Rio ECM system is different. Rio fits with existing business processes into an enterprise content management framework, it gives you the control you need and the flexibility you want. Enterprise content management organically expands throughout your organization, regardless of your industry.

Taming the Paper Monster

Their decision to go paperless with ECM was driven not by cost or budget issues, but by the desire to grow their business, tame a paper monster that was consuming every available square foot of office space, improve customer service, and keep up with a rapidly-changing financial planning industry.

In their view, they had no choice as to whether to go paperless with ECM. They must go paperless if you want to survive and thrive in the financial planning industry. They were slowly becoming buried in paper, running out of space and spending valuable time looking for missing files. And as their investment business grew, their paper mushroomed, due to trade confirmations and quarterly investment statements. When their broker-dealer conducted our annual audit in 2004, it took a long time to find required forms. That’s when they knew they had to make changes.

At Texas Christian University’s annual student job fair, Blake Woodard was manning a booth when he ran into a local Laserfiche reseller.

“I had looked at several systems,” Woodard says, “but Laserfiche offered us the greatest flexibility to work like we always had, only using enterprise content management files instead of paper. Laserfiche used TIFF files instead of proprietary file formats and used SQL as its underlying database, which gave us the ability to move our data to a different system later if we needed to. Also, the SQL platform is scalable as our electronic storage needs grow.”

Woodard Insurance purchased enterprise content management software and installed it immediately. Transition to the new system was relatively quick, given that there was an existing document management system in place, just not a digital one. Client securities files had been moved from paper file folders to three-ring binders with topical dividers and, when it came time to implement a digital solution, this interim step made the process much easier.

Where the old paper files were in strict chronological order, the topical divisions in the client binders made organizing Laserfiche’s filing structure much simpler. “We immediately began writing scanning procedures that covered the naming, indexing and location of each document in a binder,” says Woodard. These flexible procedures are updated and refined as employees encounter new situations or better ideas.

ECM: Worth the Investment?

Financial advisors are facing increased regulation and, in some instances, overlapping regulations that will constrain business and also increase their workload, add to their storage needs and require them to do additional staff training. Never has there been a greater need for electronic document management (sometimes called ECM or enterprise content management ).

Most firms look at document management as filing, whether they use paper or electronic files, and it’s often likely that they’ve set up informal procedures for handling them. A properly designed ECM system integrates work-flow procedures and controls, which usually means it is tied into a database (client relationship management software, for instance). Other firms that aren’t using enterprise content management have set up a stand-alone indexing system—a folder tree like the one you find on a computer’s operating system. But without specific, strict controls, informal systems pose problems. One is that documents can be misfiled, or worse, that employees unfamiliar with the folder trees can simply create new folders for items that should have been placed elsewhere. This makes document retrieval difficult and frustrating, to say the least.

A common mistake made by some firms is to use a system that saves documents in a PDF instead of a more secure format such as a TIFF. This means documents can be altered after the fact, and the firm risks potentially violating federal regulations. While some scanner manufacturers have addressed this issue with post-imprint symbols and other coding mechanisms to ensure authenticity, there are still lingering doubts about the security of the original documents.

It may be tough to justify additional expenses nowadays, but the simple truth is that those advisors boasting an efficient document management system can bring their costs down over time—way down. These lower costs can soften the blow of any up-front expenses and fully justify the time commitmentnecessary to implement the systems.

If you’re associated with a broker-dealer, chances are it is already offering some level of document management (form capture, forms you can fill out, outsourced electronic storage, etc.). If not, there are a host of available systems that can transform your financial practice into a highly efficient operation by helping you go paperless.

The SEC and FINRA have both ruled on the acceptability of paperless storage, retrieval and recovery. They have even ruled on the acceptability of electronic signatures (with specific guidelines). Among other things, a planner’s document management process must comply with SEC and FINRA rules, Sarbanes-Oxley and the USA Patriot Act. There should also be a way for him to provide an audit trail.

So what is stopping you? It’s likely two things: the cost and the knowledge you need to get the job done right. A typical system such as Laserfiche Avante for example, can cost about $4,000 for the initial outlay to serve an office of four staffers (and the Avante system was designed to be affordable).

While it sounds like a lot of money, though, consider what such a system could do in shaving off staff time and increasing productivity and profitability. With such a system, there would be a much faster document storage and retrieval process. The office can also go paperless, allowing a planner to save a great deal of office space and reduce staff time enough to equal the salary of another employee. So you may wish to ask yourself, would I be willing to spend $4,000 to save up to $40,000? Also consider that the annual renewal costs are much less, even though the savings continue.

Most financial advisors are only aware of Laserfiche as a provider of document management solutions for the financial advisory profession. But clients such as the Mexican Immigration Service, the country of Uganda and the U.S. Congress also use the technology. The product allows users to build a more robust enterprise-level system later, if their firms grow.

Broker-dealers often provide their own documents, many times fillable PDF versions that advisors must transmit through secure, proprietary systems the B-D owns itself. If the B-D does not supply the advisor with forms, she may need to locate a reliable source, and there are at least two: LaserApps and QuikForms. Firms like these typically offer thousands of forms for download, though advisors use only a few. It would be wise to ensure that the forms you need are actually located in these databases before signing up for them. These services might also add a form for you, if they don’t already have it in their inventory.

You may also create your own forms if they aren’t available elsewhere. For this, you need Adobe Acrobat, either in its standard or professional versions. There is a much-overlooked feature in this program that permits you to take a PDF document and create empty form fields. You may only need to do this to a few forms, so it could save hours of staff labor.

However you choose to create documents, if you use a comprehensive document management system with automated work-flow features, you can significantly increase the efficiency and profitability of your practice.