Hyland Software's Document Management Blog

Using Compliance as a Competitive Advantage

// December 15th, 2011 // No Comments » // Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Food and Beverage // Becca Toth

“Companies should be able to turn the necessity of sharing information with the outside world – what regulation is all about – to their competitive advantage,” says IT specialist Conrad Thompson. Thompson was speaking with Alan Cane of the Financial Times.

I agree. Using compliance as a competitive advantage is a great idea. Too many organizations are reactive to regulatory requirements. Interesting, because regulations aren’t going away. They’re growing. According to a September 2011 House Oversight and Government Reform Committee report on federal regulations, there are 4,257 regulatory actions in the pipeline and the number of regulatory employees is “expected to reach an all-time high of 291,676 in 2012.”

Whether you’re a manufacturer, wholesaler or retailer, complying with existing and pending regulations directly affects your bottom line. So why not flip the situation around? Instead of looking at compliance as a painful thing that needs to be done because of external forces, you can be proactive and make it part of your business plan. Don’t view compliance as laborious, because if you do it right, you’ll actually be saving time and energy. Think of regulations not as a set of rules, but as a roadmap to an effective organization.

“Regulators are not there to catch you,” Cain writes. “Their role is to ask: Are you running your business properly? Do you have the right controls in place? Are you dealing properly with customer complaints? These are all things that companies should be doing for themselves.”

Being compliant revolves around the documentation of critical business processes and procedures. You need the ability to provide documentation in a timely fashion to outside constituencies. But you can also use this as an opportunity to take your organization from the world of slow, paper-based processes to the world of real-time information and efficient automated processes. So how do you do all that?

Start by making all the information your organization uses available across the enterprise in a central repository. When employees can find the documents and data they’re looking for with the click of a mouse instead of searching for paper, they become more effective. And the ability to view information within processes in real time makes complying with regulations easy.

So don’t be reactive to compliance. Get ahead of it. And your competitors. I challenge you to become “ultra-compliant,” because if you do, regulations become nothing more than a checkmark on a list. Instead of spending time trying to comply with them, time can be spent creating new business. That’s how you leverage compliance as a competitive advantage.

Mobile ECM: Well Within Your Grasp

// December 5th, 2011 // No Comments » // Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Healthcare, Higher Education, Insurance, IT, Mobile // Lindsay McCune

Put mobile ECM into your employees' pockets

The concerns people have about ‘The Future of Work,’ with regard to mobile technologies, was top of mind for Vice President and Principal Analyst Ted Schadler. Schadler was speaking to Fortune 2000 organizations at Forrester’s Content and Collaboration Forum. Questions came pouring in:

• How are professionals using mobile devices?
• What about bring your own (BYO) versus corporate provisioning?
• What kinds of applications are available? Are they task-specific? Role-specific?
• How do I know which vendors are spending time on security and efficiency around development?
• How do I manage licensing?
• What about security?

To my surprise, some organizations anticipate it will take five years to get comfortable with mobile devices and all that goes into managing them. And while mobile will mature over the next few years, you shouldn’t stand still and try to catch up later.

It’s time for organizations to take small steps, and move out from under the blanket of consumer mobile enablement. It’s time to empower the worker. They have valuable needs that can be addressed today.

Enable your workforce

It is all about enablement – not just about devices or applications, but rather overall empowerment. Sure there are lots to things to consider – security and licensing, for example – but you don’t have to eat the whole apple. Just bite off what you can chew.

Start with roles or departments, like human resources or managers, rather than the diverse enterprise. Baby steps! Consider your goals and which employees would benefit most.

Maybe you are thinking you have much bigger fish to fry and that mobile business solutions are low on your priority list. I would argue that bringing your mobile devices into play with even your most basic business processes will reap immediate rewards and have a dramatic impact on your business.

How about an example

So, let’s imagine you are a human resources manager hiring new employees. Let’s also imagine you are on vacation in Hawaii. Your company is competitive and needs to act quickly to get offer letters and other documentation to your soon-to-be colleagues. But you are hanging out by the ocean and won’t be back for a week. Those irreplaceable new hires now take the offer of your competitor. Think of the now wasted time spent interviewing, completing reference checks and all.

Now, imagine you are in Hawaii and getting ready for the day, checking the weather on your smartphone and you notice that you also have notifications from your mobile enterprise content management (ECM) application to approve. Through your mobile device, you can push these offer letters through workflow. With a few taps, you’re done.

It’s time to look beyond mobile’s soft consumer side and empower the devices to make your organization more efficient and more competitive. Are you ready?

The White House on Records Management: ‘We Can’t Wait’

// November 29th, 2011 // No Comments » // Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Affordable Housing, Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Federal Government, Finance & Administration, Government, Health & Human Services, Human Resources, Justice & Public Safety, Public Works, State and Local Government // Terri Jones

“Records management can’t wait,” President Barack Obama told the federal government agencies yesterday, via presidential memorandum. It’s likely the federal government could learn a lot from state and local government agencies who have already embraced records management. Maybe you can, too.

The president hopes to transform federal agencies and create more transparency. How this will happen is captured in a White House blog post titled “We Can’t Wait: Bringing Records Management into the Twenty-First Century.”

It is a great post, but I believe it’s possible many readers will overlook a small – but important – phrase:

“…The [Records Management] Directive will focus on maintaining accountability to the American public through documenting agency actions; increasing efficiency (and thus reducing costs); and switching, where feasible, from paper-based records to electronic records.”

In those few words highlighted above, the enterprise content management (ECM) community rejoices. Why? Because ECM is a valuable tool for government, and it is an investment that should be made at every level of government, even in this time of severe budget reductions.

You see, the flexibility of a good ECM solution means the solution can become a tool for many government departments and initiatives. Understanding this, thousands of cities and counties across the country have already embraced electronic records and ECM, and have used the solution to meet a number of needs. We can see the result:

• Reduced costs. From eliminating paper and file cabinets to the costs of storing and moving files.
• Reclaiming staff time. No more searching for files, no lost documents, no filing, printing or photocopying.
• Speeding up government. Workflow automation shaves days off of processes; physical paper files replaced with electronic allow more staff to simultaneously access information.
• Connecting documents and data. Easy information retrieval helps make the transition from paper files to electronic records easy and intuitive for users, and requires little or no staff training.

At the same time, the ECM investment lays the foundation for meeting transparency and open government initiatives, while realizing all of the lowered costs and efficiency government organizations need to survive. So, access to records can take place through a website or a kiosk or a computer station at an office, improving constituent service while reducing the staff time needed to fill requests.

The good news for federal agencies is that they need look no farther than the counties and cities who have invested in an ECM solution. Other counties and cities who are considering an ECM solution can similarly find ideas and proven value thanks to the examples of their peers.

Current government ECM users show that creating transparency is just one of the benefits of moving to electronic records. So, while federal agencies may make this transition to meet a presidential memorandum on Open Government, their efforts could end up improving government operations, reducing costs and reclaiming staff time for the important work they do. The proof is in the results of cities and counties who have already moved to include ECM as one of their IT tools.

The Evolution of ECM and the Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM, 2011

// October 20th, 2011 // No Comments » // Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, Food and Beverage, Government, Healthcare, Higher Education, Insurance, IT // AJ Hyland

While the stand-out fact in this year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM, 2011, was the 7.6 percent growth in the ECM industry, even in a down economy and as organizations tighten their tech investment belts, what’s more remarkable is the rapid evolution of enterprise content management as a strategic business solution. 

Gone are the days when ECM was little more than a means by which companies transformed paper documentation into electronic information and then organized and disseminated that information to employees and staff. That still occurs, but it is really now only a foundational piece to a much larger solution.

Or, truly, solutions, because every organization is as different as the business content and process challenges they face. You see, it’s about more than knowing where your information is and how to quickly access it. It’s about leveraging that information in a meaningful way so that you can achieve your specific organizational goals, all the while taking care to achieve just the right balance of focus and flexibility in that endeavor.

What do I mean by this?

I’m saying think of your ECM solution holistically – beyond what you want to capture and how you want to capture it. Consider who will access this information. When will they do it and why? Is your audience an admissions staff? Or a business decision maker whose office is in the air or on the road? Is that information critical to keeping your business moving forward, to beating the competition or better serve a constituent?

In other words, are you leveraging your information in a meaningful way? Do you have a protocol in place should your admissions staff get snowed in during the busiest time of year? Can your managers and executives make decisions via their mobile phones whether they’re in Boston or Bermuda?

A strategic ECM solution must have the flexibility to help answer those questions. It must work in concert with other software solutions, to accurately capture, process and quickly distribute information to staff when and where they need it, and connect the content dots that allow organizations to gain the competitive advantage, better serve their constituents – or both.

Strategic ECM vendors will help organizations elevate their game by focusing on speed of deployment, getting organizations up and running faster, putting them ahead of the competition sooner or offering improved services to constituents faster.

After all, the strategic use of ECM is a differentiator for today’s organizations. And there is ample opportunity to become even more competitive using ECM technology.

Enterprise Content Management: A Simple Step Toward Sustainability

// October 3rd, 2011 // No Comments » // Back Office, Enterprise content management, Food and Beverage, Uncategorized // Becca Toth

Sustainability is top of mind for most companies today. Even as a consumer, you can’t go many places without hearing, seeing or reading something about “going green.” 

Thus, sustainability, or “going green,” is a sweeping trend in the corporate sector as well.  From a corporate perspective, we often hear companies take on initiatives to install solar panels or reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  These are certainly great steps toward making organizations “sustainable,” but what about the internal business processes of most companies? What about the methods most employees use to get their day-to-day work done? How does that fit in?

Having worked for companies in different industries, I know that the practice of relying on manual paper-based processes is just a way of getting things done.  But taking a step back and looking at most organizations’ internal departments , it is staggering the amount of paper that is not only consumed, but then stored. Moving away from manual processes is definately a cultural change for many employees – even a difficult change for some – but this presents a golden opportunity for companies to “go green” in the office place. 

A report published by the North Carolina Division of Pollution Prevention and Environmental Assistance titled “A Checklist for Office Sustainability,”  outlined five main areas within the office to consider in any sustainability initiative:

• Paper usage,
• Equipment usage,
• Recycling and reuse,
• Utilities, and
• Office sustainability practices. 

Under paper usage alone, nine areas were considered when evaluating waste reduction activities.  So where do most companies begin? 

Evaluating how your organization uses paper, and more specifically how each specific department uses paper, is an easy starting place.  Some important questions to ask yourself or others in your department: Do documents exist in paper form that can be converted into an electronic format? Are there forms or documents made or used electronically or both?

Streamlining or removing a lot of the manual paper-based processes and moving toward an automated process for dealing with those activities will not only provide an opportunity to infuse green practices in the office, but also increase operational efficiencies and reduce a lot of non-value activities. 

A smart, strategic enterprise content management solution can help companies realize these goals. Want to know more? Check out Hyland Software’s ECM Solution Guide.

When the back office is the place to start in government – Flipping around the document management decision

// December 7th, 2010 // No Comments » // Back Office, Government // Terri Jones

Many government agencies buy document management software first and foremost for compliance. In my agency, we had some serious rules around the use of community development and affordable housing funds. Documents had to be maintained for 35 years, but also had to be accessible for annual reviews and the annual outside audits from federal and state agencies.

So, in these very forward-facing areas, records management and workflow have strong support communities. Most people understand the value of the line of business systems they use – ESRI, Emphasys, Tenmast, Harmony, Curam, CourtView, etc.  And, they get how enterprise content management can and should be integrated to make these systems really effective.

But what about the back office?

As government shrinks, it becomes more and more difficult to accomplish the basic tasks of tracking contracts, paying the bills, doing inventory or handling human resources. Even filing may be a problem because administrative staffs are often the first positions to go.

Why?

Because they are not “match,” meaning that the dollars spent on their positions may not be match for much-needed state and federal dollars. And, in these budget times, agencies may be forced to cut these positions because, for the most part, they only have dollars to spend that match the state and federal funds they receive.

These cuts have nothing to do with the level of work being done. It’s simply a matter of the fact that there aren’t enough dollars to go around – and the dollars first go to meet the match requirements of your funders. Moreover,  since these positions aren’t forward-facing in terms of serving constituents – positions like caseworkers, police officers, firefighters, teachers – they seem like better positions to cut so that services can be maintained as long as possible.

These unfortunate realities are causing a new trend in government’s use of ECM. Someone has to pick up the slack for those staff reductions, right? Well, in many cases, part of the slack is being handled by technology. We’re now seeing that, more and more, government agencies are actually buying ECM to help close these newly created resource gaps in their internal process first. It’s only when they get the results they need in these areas that they move beyond to forward-facing processes.

So, whether your agency owns a full-blown ECM solution, or is just starting to consider one based on staff reductions in administrative areas, now is the time to look there for your document management projects. And, despite the pressure to do things for your constituents, that’s exactly what flipping around the typical document management deployment will do.

To many, this concept might seem topsy-turvy in comparison with the usual ECM approach. But consider this: if government agencies start by automating the “back office” with ECM, government will be able to focus staff on the valuable forward-facing work – work that serves citizens and betters our communities. Now that’s the real definition of “doing more with less.”

Bringing front-line lending efficiency to back office operations

// December 1st, 2010 // No Comments » // Back Office, Financial Services, Lending // Sam Mazzola

Process automation isn’t a new concept for the mortgage industry. Over time, lenders have realized that the processes – new loan and renewal – are very paper-intensive. Not to mention, there’s a lot of sending documents back and forth among lenders, support staff and underwriters.

So, naturally, they did something about it. In many cases, that something was software, a combination of document management, imaging, workflow and process management.

However, that’s where the efficiency stopped – the front-office. Lenders found the competitive advantage they were looking for, and that was enough.

Today, it’s not enough anymore.

With any advantage being a competitive one, there’s (finally) a rapidly increasing trend in taking that automation to the back-office– and with big results. In fact, at a recent presentation at the MBA’s Mortgage Operations conference, it was reported that lenders can save $2,000 per loan in those back-office, operational expenses by going paperless.

I’m usually pretty skeptical of stats, but that one stuck with me. It put the back-office benefit in the context of the front-office – exactly how it needs to be positioned to be heard.

So where is this $2,000 savings coming from?

Looking at the primary administrative functions, the ones that usually come to mind are accounting and human resources. Let’s take accounts payable. Through integrated document management and workflow, organizations have the ability to set up automated processing for purchase orders, invoices and exceptions. This significantly decreases turnaround time and allows institutions to take advantage of early payment discounts and eliminate late-payment penalties.

In human resources, it’s all about employee productivity. Much of this department’s time is spent manually performing administrative tasks such as performance evaluations, compensation plan changes and time-off requests, or more routine functions, like changing name and address data, entering vacation dates, and filing or retrieving employee records. By streamlining and automating these processes, HR employees are able to be more efficient and spend time on more critical tasks, like recruitment.

These benefits are all well and good. But lenders need to go beyond even these departmental views of the back-office. There are huge opportunities for savings in other areas, areas that almost all employees touch every day.

I have a few ideas in mind of what these areas are, but what do you think? What else is the mortgage lending business missing right now in automating the back-office?

Accounts payable vs. accounts receivable: Managing the invoice tug-of-war in accounting and finance with software

// July 27th, 2010 // No Comments » // Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable // Jasin Kessler

My son just finished up a week at summer camp. At the end of the week, the parents were invited to a family day to see what their kids worked on, play games, and most importantly, to take their kids home. But, as usual, the clear favorite game of the day was tug-of-war. You know, the classic matchup of one team pulling for supremacy over the other. Brute strength is often the deciding factor.

It’s funny how so many things in life are a proverbial tug-of-war. At home, it might be struggling between purchasing that new entertainment system versus the roof on your house. At dinner, it might be the healthy choice versus the hearty choice. And at work, it might be in the accounting and finance department, specifically accounts payable (AP) versus accounts receivable (AR).

If you’re not in AP or AR, let me explain why this is such a battle. AP often interacts with a vendor’s accounts receivable department. Conversely, in AR, a customer’s accounts payable department is your regular contact. And I bet those conversations aren’t about the latest summer blockbuster or the weather for the weekend. Much too often it’s a tug-of-war over money. Did you receive an invoice from your vendor that you don’t think is correct? Or did you send an invoice to your customer, only to receive back a portion of the payment you originally requested?

So who wins? Just like at summer camp, the winner is the one with the most strength. But in this case, strength isn’t about muscles. Rather, it’s information that is the source of power. And in the AP versus AR tug-of-war, the winner is the one with the best information. Whoever’s records are best, whoever’s proof is better, and whoever has the confidence that all of the information they need is right at their finger tips will come out on top.

But there are plenty of obstacles along the way preventing a victorious finish. Too often the information is very decentralized. Think about it sitting in a file folder, manufacturing specs on the production floor, shipping documents and photographs in the warehouse, and invoicing information stuck in the accounting system. And what about all of the e-mails and phone calls that took place in between?

To prevent these obstacles, centralizing the information is key. To do so, you must be able to capture content from any number of sources and interrelate it to each other. Using software like enterprise content management (ECM), this can be done. When a purchase order is issued, it’s tagged with a number. Then, all of the subsequent documents, e-mails, photos, specifications, etc. are tagged with that same number. Now, you have all the information you need. More importantly, you have all the information you need in one place. ECM is like a one-stop-shop for information that touches all the areas of an organization’s finance operations.

So when you are haggling with your vendor’s AR department or your customer’s AP department, think about how long it would take you to gather all of the information you will need to win your argument. Then think about ECM. Without it, you might need to resort to brute strength to win, but with ECM, the strength of the information you have right at your finger tips will give you the proof you need to win the AP versus AR tug-of-war.