Is ECM for my company?

ECM stands for Enterprise Content Management and was created in 2000 by an american organization called AIIM (Association for Intelligent Information Management). We can define it as a set of technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and make information available. Below is a brief explanation of each of its steps.

• Capture: capture comes down to searching for information from different sources – which can be obtained from any type of media, such as smartphones, scanners, etc – and inserting its content into a system;
• Manage: organizing information and setting permissions so that data can be found by whom it is intended;
• Store: finding a suitable/consistent medium to store the information;
• Preserve: taking care of information in the long term, in order to keep it always preserved and readily available (this phase must be thought of for the future of the organization);
• Make available: making the information available to people and at the correct moments.

These are very relevant topics about the document management phases, but for you to be able to understand if ECM is really worth it for your organization, an important question comes to mind:

How can ECM be used in a company?

Now that we know what ECM is, we can talk about how and for what reasons we can use it within our company.

An ECM tool has the power to simplify information management within the organization, using document management, workflow setting, and data extraction and transformation into useful information for decision-making. And besides knowing these features, you need to grasp how these technologies included in ECM can actually help you.

• Document Storage and management: by not depending on physical records, it consequently generates more security for users, as the chance of document loss or misplacement is eliminated. With ECM, the company gains information and file traceability in an agile way (through indexing), being able to search for keywords or even words contained within its documents – which is also called OCR (optical character recognition). In addition to identifying information within files, this functionality also allows document scanning;
• Cost reduction and space optimization: the fact of having all the data in a technological environment makes the use of paper almost extinct in the company. This generates a decrease in the use of paper and, consequently, a lower expense with this type of material and the release of spaces that were previously occupied, which may have another functionality;
• Improved internal processes structuring and integration: workflows can be modeled to encompass any business rule, that is, we can involve different company areas. Actions that depend on external roles, such as suppliers and customers, can be included in the processes, where all information exchange can be done within a single tool, in real-time, and from any type of device;
• Information security: in addition to data being protected by password-dependent login, it is also possible to restrict permissions within an ECM tool. These permissions can be applied to documents, folders, processes, queries and even entire modules, and can be separated by groups, roles and users;
• Integration between processes and documents: processes (BPM) and documents (EDM) are two aspects considered distinct within the ECM, however, nothing prevents the two from being able to relate. For example, we can configure releases of document versions that have approval processes and we can also create flows that include files released in the document manager (GED) to compose task information;
• Versioning: document versioning is the most common feature found in ECM-type tools. We can version user information, process models, and crucial information for the system to work, such as e-mail and authentication settings and everything that includes the administrative part of the tool. When we mention versioning, we can best exemplify it as a record of changes that the object has undergone over time – who changed it, on what date and time, and what was the change made.

To sum it up, we can state that ECM is a great information management facilitator which consequently enables gains in productivity and time, in addition to cost reduction.

After all the points highlighted in this article, is there still any doubt that your company needs an ECM tool?