Hyland Software's Document Management Blog

Connecting Systems, People and Processes with Workflow – Part 3: Connecting Processes

// May 9th, 2012 // No Comments » // Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, Human Resources, IT, Uncategorized, Workflow // Michelle Shapiro

In Parts 1 and 2 of this series, we looked at how using workflow to connect systems and people helps you reduce information silos and ensures stakeholders know the status of important processes. Now we’re going to take a look at how to use workflow to connect those processes.

Workflow isn’t just a way to automatically push documents through work queues – it also optimizes your processes. You do so by using a framework of consistent rules that efficiently route electronic documents without manual intervention. By presenting users with all related documents simultaneously, workflow facilitates business transactions. That means employees aren’t repeatedly asking for emails, searching through file cabinets or waiting for documents.

Workflow also gives you visibility into your processes, so you know exactly where things are and manage the organization based on real-time information. That’s the key to connecting your processes – making sure you’re sharing current information.

Ensure consistent business practices
Workflow increases your speed and accuracy by eliminating any variances in the way individual employees handle processes, therefore reducing any associated risks. Ensuring that employees always handle processes the correct way helps you stay in compliance with local, state and federal regulations. Workflow also shows you real-time document and process status, as well as historical data, which saves time and energy when preparing for audits.

From accounts payable to human resources and contract management, workflow expands beyond banking processes to eliminate paper across your financial institution. Here’s how it makes sure work doesn’t slip through the cracks:

• Automatic email notifications alert users when their participation is needed
• Configurable timers move documents through processes without manual intervention
• Role-based calendars and load balancing ensure documents are processed efficiently by available users

Integrate to tie everything together
An important aspect of any document management system is its ability to easily integrate with the core banking system you rely on every day. The short list includes FIS, Fiserv, Harland Financial Solutions, Jack Henry and Open Solutions. Integration ensures compatibility, so you’re automatically forwarding documents that are usable. That’s why the document management system you use should able to handle any document type or file format.

Connecting your systems, people and processes with workflow helps you move quickly and accurately without misplacing documents. That gives you a competitive advantage in the marketplace, because your employees are empowered to focus on customers and members.

And that’s the most important connection of all.

Connecting Systems, People and Processes with Workflow – Part 2: Connecting People

// May 1st, 2012 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, Lending, Uncategorized, Workflow // Michelle Shapiro

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at how connecting your systems with workflow helps rid your organization of information silos – including those found in your core banking or loan origination platforms. Now let’s see how workflow connects people with the information they need by automating manual and paper-based work processes.

First, let’s admit that no matter how hard we try, some processes still rely heavily on paper. And as much as we’d like, we’ll never be rid of paper entirely. But we can take steps to electronically capture the information on that paper, priming it for the workflow process.

Once stored electronically in a central database, you can give your employees instant access to that information. More than that, by using workflow, you can push that information out to employees instantaneously, automating processes and connecting people through information.

The mortgage origination process is a great example. Your loan origination system (LOS) has an internal workflow that collects data in the application phase. Ultimately, the workflow places loan requests into a status or work queue where they sit and wait for underwriters to make decisions. When underwriters retrieve loans from the queue, they gain access to all the information the originators entered. In most cases, they also receive paper loan files with supporting documents.

This is where enterprise content management (ECM) helps. Working behind the scenes, ECM integrates systems with data from your LOS and transactional workflows. By letting users stay in familiar business applications, they avoid the need to log in and out of different systems, creating greater productivity. They immediately find the documentation they need, when they need it. And, if done right, that increased speed and accuracy translates to exceptional customer service.

By using electronic workflow to move documents forward, you revolutionize your loan process. Like Milwaukee-based PyraMax Bank did.

“Our mortgage files are just huge – at least 100 pages of paper each,” says Denise Merkel, AVP of Data and Financial Services for PyraMax. “We knew if we could eliminate some of that paper, we could increase the speed of the lending process and service to our clients.” So PyraMax did just that. And saved $10,000 every month in paper costs.

Automated workflow provides benefits that don’t exist in a paper-based world. It seamlessly connects people to business critical documents. Automatically receiving, routing and completing all relevant documentation speeds up your loan process so you recognize profits quicker. It also helps keep the American dream alive so families can move into their homes sooner.

Part 3 of the series will take a look at how to use workflow to connect your processes to improve and optimize them, giving your financial institution further competitive advantages in the marketplace.

Connecting Systems, People and Processes with Workflow, Part 1: Connecting Systems

// April 20th, 2012 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, IT, Workflow // Michelle Shapiro

As financial institutions rely more and more on technology, it’s imperative that systems can easily communicate. No more silos.

A recent article in Financial Times echoed this belief, because so many financial institutions are dealing with this very subject. “Digital efforts in many firms lack scale, are disjointed and are often the pet project of one silo within the organization,” it says.

Systems that lack easy communication slow things down. In the age of increasing digital connectedness, employees can become frustrated when the technologies they rely on every day can’t talk to each other. It also negatively affects business relationships outside the organization.

To better meet the needs of customers and members in a very competitive environment, financial institutions need to get as much value as possible out of existing technologies and resources. One of the most cost-effective options is to use electronic workflow  to increase the capabilities of your existing document management or enterprise content management (ECM) solution.

Workflow automates processes and the routing of documents, which means your organization works faster and more efficiently. Since documents are easily accessible in a central database, there’s no more searching. With information at their fingertips, employees focus on organizational goals – like contributing to the bottom line.

Tying systems to the bottom line
Let’s take a quick look at how workflow’s ability to connect systems affects the bottom line. Workflows begin with events, like a new loan document ingested into the system. Most loan operations departments receive daily “Paid Off” reports. At that point, they determine if overpayment refunds are required or if they need to release or return collateral. Then they initiate record retention periods for the loan files. It’s a slow process, especially when employees have to wait for paper documentation or systems can’t share information.

Workflow speeds the process dramatically by sharing that information between systems, identifying process triggers and then automatically delivering the related documents or information through a lifecycle of pre-configured work queues. Everyone who needs to see information receives an email notification alert, letting them know that it’s ready for review.

That’s how connecting your systems increases communication, speed and accuracy – ultimately affecting the bottom line.

Connecting systems to make them work for you
To connect your systems without disruption, the right workflow solution should be simple to configure and easily integrate with your existing systems, including your core banking, loan origination and other critical line of business systems – giving the technologies you rely on every day the ability to communicate seamlessly with one another. Make sure it integrates without custom coding, so when you’re ready, you can easily expand the solution on your own. 

In the next part of the series, we’ll take a look at how using workflow to connect people takes that speed and accuracy to the next level.

Let’s Talk About the ‘Enterprise’ in ECM

// April 9th, 2012 // No Comments » // Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, Food and Beverage, Government, Healthcare, Higher Education, Insurance, IT // Thomas Jenkins

We say it every day: “Enterprise Content Management” or “ECM.” We hear folks throw out words like “enterprise” records management strategy, “enterprise” document management, and “enterprise” capture or delivery models.

But despite all the “enterprise” jargon out there, organizations often find themselves taking a less than enterprise approach. That is, they immediately start off on an initiative of strategy limited to one office, department or division. They make the argument, “We need to increase productivity and see these efficiencies yesterday.”

So we put a solution in place and let it be. But in the long run, the organization or a project management office fails to convey the results to the larger enterprise because they’ve got little invested interest from others outside of their office, department or division – or at the enterprise level.

What happens next? Someone in another office, department or division fails to get their face-time with the project, results aren’t communicated, value isn’t seen, and then they go out and seek an alternative solution or strategy to hopefully realize the same enhancements and see such efficiencies. IT is left supporting multiple applications and different platforms. We hire people to manage individual solutions. We custom code. We pay for maintenance, upgrades and support on several systems. We bring on a business analyst to find out why we’re doing all this. Systems fail, products are sunset. And we’ve now got complex and over-engineered processes and tools cluttering up our day-to-day transactions.       

Whoa!? What happened to our enterprise approach?

And in terms of ECM deployments, now you’ve got multiple ECM systems. And if you haven’t seen it before, now you’ve got multiple lines of business processing and capturing similar documentation in totally different methods. Some users are capturing and classifying directly via Microsoft Outlook. Others are dragging and dropping all over the place. Some are using SharePoint. Remote users still prefer to save documents to their local or shared network drives. And some users are even printing and scanning images back into the ECM system.

If we’re going to talk about streamlining operations and improving efficiencies; tying business and technology together end-to-end; and improving an organization’s ability to collaborate more effectively – those are bigger concepts than just one or two office, departments or divisions can solve. They require participation and a vested interest by all parties. You need to understand the overarching and individual goals across the “enterprise.” Not just wherever the hot button is right now, because with as quickly as markets and strategies can shift, so can enterprise priorities.

So start by taking a more pragmatic, “yes,” “enterprise” approach. Believe it or not, you can always make a new investment in the latest and greatest product or service. However, if you buy into a system or strategy without taking a comprehensive 360 view of how (or if) your users will adopt it, use it, and/or react to it – the benefits and your hard or soft investment in terms of cost and time – may never be realized.

Follow an approach that engages either the entire organization or a select population. Engage more than just local technical experts. Bring in business and subject matter experts, executive or senior leadership, and the frontline employees. Understand what each office, department or division is working on today and what they need to deliver tomorrow. What’s prohibiting them from doing so? What are their challenges? Their goals? And what does long-term program success look like?

So the next time you say “Enterprise Content Management,” or “ECM,” think to yourself are you really talking about Enterprise Content Management? And what can you do to ensure you and your organization are getting the most out of your investment? My answer: think about your approach. Define a strategy and a path for who, what and where to engage. And then you’ll realize the real benefits of what Enterprise Content Management and OnBase can be.

Sharing the Love: Community Banks, Document Management and ECM

// April 6th, 2012 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, IT // Michelle Shapiro

A recent quote from the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) struck me as simple, powerful and true. “Community banks are about Main Street,” it says. “They’re the financial foundations of our country.” By keeping money and revenue local, community banks focus on people and businesses in the area, building relationships and opportunities.  

That’s especially important in tough economic times. Because running a successful community bank means you need to help your community be successful as well.

With that in mind, and with April being community banking month, ICBA has launched the second edition of its popular “I Love My Community Bank” campaign, designed to celebrate and draw attention to the importance of community banks.

So how do you make sure your customers are really feeling the love? With all the choices they have these days – megabanks, other community banks and credit unions – you need to make sure you’re offering customers and potential customers the best service you can.

But love for a community bank doesn’t just come from the outside – it starts inside, with an efficient organization. The more you do for your customers and outside stakeholders on a timely basis, the better. A great way to do that is to give employees the ability to find what they’re looking for with a few mouse-clicks, instead of searching through file cabinets, folders or file shares.

After all, what your employees are looking for is customer information, often while a customer is right there in front of them or on the phone or waiting for an answer. And customers love when you can provide a more complete answer swiftly and accurately.

That’s a difficult task in a lot of organizations. Especially those that haven’t evolved from the Box-in-the-Basement Age to the Information Age.

But for community banks that embrace new ways of thinking, like electronically storing all the paper that comes in the door every day from all over the organization – including branch locations and operations centers – in one central location, achieving customer love becomes much, much easier.

Reducing your dependency on manual and paper-based processes gives you the ability to focus on what’s important – your customers and the community. And it reduces the costs involved with storing, shipping and searching for paper.

Utilizing a document management or enterprise content management (ECM) solution to automate processes is a great way to:

• Shorten lending cycles
• Share information by integrating with your core banking system
• Meet compliance regulations

When you’re empowered to quickly and efficiently serve the community, that’s when people say, “I love my community bank.” And they’ll really mean it.

Keeping Your Credit Union Ahead of the Tech Curve

// March 23rd, 2012 // No Comments » // Cloud Computing, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, IT // Michelle Shapiro

“One of the biggest barriers credit unions face in improving internal efficiency and member service is integrating different technologies into a seamless experience,” says Credit Union Magazine.

That’s important, because credit union members are quickly embracing all the latest high-tech gadgets and enjoying the speed and freedom they offer. Chances are they’re wondering why they can’t use all those wonderful tools to do business with you.

That’s why you need to figure out an integration strategy. Now. Because if you don’t have a centrally located and secure place to store, manage and route all your current information, regardless of file type, pushing it out via high-tech gadgets is meaningless. You need to go beyond your core banking solution, because you don’t just handle banking documents.

There are two key ways to ensure you successfully integrate your technologies. One, it needs to be easy. And two, it needs to be non-interruptive, so your employees continue to focus on providing superior member service while you improve your internal systems by decreasing your dependency on paper and manual processes.

To make that solution easy, focus on an integration strategy that can be handled without custom coding. That way, as your credit union grows and evolves, your technologies can, too – without paying solution providers tens of thousands of dollars to write custom code for you every time you want to make a change.

Being non-interruptive will come naturally if the solution is easy to implement. That’s why you should do your homework when researching vendors. Remember, too, that it’s all about tying your systems together so they communicate, giving your employees access to member information at their fingertips, without leaving the applications they’re familiar with.

What does a successful integration look like? It looks like one that most employees don’t even realize is there. All they care about is that they can get the information they’re looking for quickly – without putting a member on hold while they search for it in an unfamiliar system.

Not giving your members – and the millions of people now looking into credit unions for the first time – the options they’re looking for means they’ll look elsewhere. And they’re looking. According to Callahan & Associates, the credit union industry added a record 1.8 million new checking accounts in 2011 and 440,000 new members in the fourth quarter of 2011 alone.

So don’t wait. Now is the time to increase your member service by offering the latest tools. And the first step is integrating your technologies, so real-time information is flowing through them.

Manual Labor and Capture: The Thorn in the Side of ECM

// March 12th, 2012 // No Comments » // Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Admissions, Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, Food and Beverage, Government, Healthcare, Higher Education, Human Resources, Insurance, IT, Lending // Glenn Gibson

“Every rose has its thorn.” So croons Bret Michaels in the famous Poison song of the same name.

When it comes to relationships, he has a point. But is it also true of your enterprise content management (ECM) solution? If ECM is the beautiful rose, what is its thorn? 

Two simple – and expensive – words: manual labor.

Yes, after we settle in to enjoy the beautiful return on investment (ROI) of our ECM solution, we soon realize that the labor involved with manually typing document index values (names, addresses, account numbers and so forth) into our ECM system takes a lot of time and effort. It begins to feel, well, thorny. 

Even the study materials for the industry-recognized ECM certification CDIA+ tell us that manual labor associated with scanning and indexing can be the most expensive part of an ECM project.

Why?  Because manual data entry is slow, tedious and error-prone.

And those keyed-in errors can be very costly.

Costly errors in many locations

Much akin to someone misfiling a paper document, badly indexed electronic documents make your information difficult to find later on. This dramatically increases business process costs and can even lead to wrong decisions made due to incomplete information.

Now consider that your ECM system is only one of the places that this information is manually entered.  Duplicate data is often typed into several business systems, often by a variety of people across your organization.  Every time the same information is manually inputted, your risk of error increases.

And that just leads to added costs. Many organizations spend a ton of money on manual labor associated with indexing, but then turn around and spend more money on QA processes to make sure that the information is entered accurately.

So is there any way to extract this thorn from the side of ECM?  Yes, and it’s easy – stop doing manual data entry. It’s just painful.

Option 1:  Add ‘Advanced Capture’ technology to your ECM solution

People are not the only ones who can read and write, you know. Technological advancements allow computers to recognize relevant characters from a page, either typed or hand written, translate these into words, verify that they are correct, and fill in data fields for you.  What’s amazing is that this information can then be used to update ALL your other systems, simultaneously. 

Option 2: Outsource your scanning and indexing.

This option takes the manual labor associated with scanning and indexing off your hands altogether!  Instead of buying and maintaining scanners, and employing people to load them with paper and manually type in the index values, you can simply pay a fee for an organization with a Imaging Services department to do this for you.

Through this process, you send your documents to a central location where the scanning and indexing can be done for you, allowing you to instantly upload the documents and relevant data into your ECM and other relevant systems. 

This option can be a very cost effective approach for converting all those dusty boxes of documents into clean, easily accessible digital images.

So there you have it, there really is no reason to feel the pain of manual labor with your ECM system.  Depending on your business needs, you have two very good options to choose from.

In the end, it seems that Bret Michaels was actually wrong.  When penning those famous words in 1988, he had obviously never heard of the quite beautiful and thorn-less Lady Banks Rose. 

It’s likely that he hadn’t heard of Advanced Capture technologies out-sourced scanning providers either.

To Do More With Less, Banks Should Consider Lean IT

// January 6th, 2012 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, IT // Michelle Shapiro

Is your bank lean? What does that even mean?

Being lean is all about creating as much value for the customer as possible by eliminating processes that consume time, resources and space. In a word: efficiency.

The concept is usually associated with manufacturing, but your bank can be a lean operation as well. And the best place to start is in your IT department. “On average, financial institutions spend more on IT than other industries do, but the value of their investment is often unrealized,” reports McKinsey Quarterly, the business journal of management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

After all,every day, the IT function is becoming more and more important as a driver to deliver value to the customer. A more efficient – and more lean – IT department only increases that value.

Obviously, buying software without a master plan to integrate it into existing processes isn’t the way to go. Financial institutions need to “draw on lean operating principles [to] build the more efficient models that banks need today,” McKinsey counsels.

One way many financial institutions are realizing lean value in IT is through enterprise content management (ECM). ECM solutions, like document management and workflow, provide organizations with sophisticated process automation and case-based applications. It allows you to manage content according to your organization’s business rules and gauge the health of those processes in real-time, adjusting as necessary, growing leaner with each modification.

.Not only that, but by utilizing ECM to automate processes, you can reduce your reliance on paper, saving money on storage and shipping costs. And by using an ECM solution to integrate the core systems you use every day, you can increase the value of technology investments by giving them the ability to communicate with each other. You may even be able to replace wasteful legacy IT systems.

First step toward lean banking

When you begin any automation project, the most important step is the first one: streamlining processes. Otherwise, you might automate a messy process and end up with an automated messy process. That’s how the value of an IT investment goes unrealized.

The trick is figuring out how you handle your core operations. Think about your accounting and human resource functions. In those two departments alone, you have numerous opportunities to gain efficiencies by replacing inefficient paper-based processes with electronic documentation that can be automatically routed through processes from start to finish.

Procurement, fixed asset management, AR, AP, payroll, expenses, budgeting, recruiting, onboarding, performance and promotion management, policy and procedure administration – all these processes depend on documentation. Wouldn’t you rather have all of it centrally located and available to anyone who needs it with a simple mouse click instead of storing it in file cabinets or file shares?

By initiating lean concepts where important information is stored and shared – the IT department – here’s what your bank can accomplish with ECM:

• Streamline operations and improve collaboration among employees
• Reduce the time and cost of performing important business functions
• Tie together the technologies you use every day and give them the ability to communicate
• Improve the ability of the entire enterprise to share and act on corporate information assets
• Help comply with existing and pending regulations