Hyland Software's Document Management Blog

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

The ‘Dreaded’ Dodd-Frank: Is Your Data Compliant?

// November 8th, 2011 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services // Michelle Shapiro

I can’t check my email without reading something about Dodd-Frank. It’s been a headliner at every conference I’ve attended this year.

At MBA’s 98^th Annual Convention, U.S. Rep. Spencer Bachus demonstrated both the length and detail of the new regulatory legislation by carrying on stage – and then dumping – a box filled with thousands of pages of regulations affected by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

While a bit dramatic, it highlighted how huge and complex data requirements imposed by Dodd-Frank are. For banks, there are new reporting requirements for compliance and risk mitigation, as well as new records that must be captured. Where to begin, right?

Your top priority is to make sure your systems are secure, auditable, traceable and flexible enough to quickly adapt to any new regulations. By leveraging an enterprise content management (ECM) or document management solution, you will have the tools to ensure consistent record keeping while guaranteeing the right information is available to the right people.

It will also give you the ability to automate document retention in a secure system, provide consistent disposition and immediately respond to audit requests and legal concerns. You can also control revisions of documents and instantly track changes to records, making traceability a non-issue. And your increased visibility into information and processes will help you adapt to new regulations.

Your second priority is to consolidate records and reporting across your institution’s different departments and regions in order to comply with Dodd-Frank’s new reporting requirements. The right ECM solution captures, stores, manages and shares any type of documentation – including reports from the core – in one easy-to-use interface.

It also gives financial institutions the ability to allow for instant and secure access to reports and documentation across the enterprise, regardless of geographical location. This helps you meet the Dodd-Frank requirements, but it also provides increased ability to analyze data, so you can make better decisions and support your institution’s growth initiatives.

All eyes are on Wall Street and the legislation that affects it. Banking divisions, affiliates and their disparate data sources need to be better integrated and more transparent than ever before.

Stay out of negative headlines, avoid hefty penalties, comply with reporting requirements and focus on achieving your goals by using an ECM solution to manage your documents and data.

Keeping Up With Technology: Award Winner Demonstrates Best Practices for Credit Unions

// November 1st, 2011 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, IT // Michelle Shapiro

Technology makes huge leaps forward every day. Just like any other business, your credit union needs to keep pace with all those technological changes so it can lower costs and increase efficiencies. If you can’t manage this process, you’re going to have a difficult time staying relevant in the industry.

To support innovative approaches to solving everyday business challenges through the use of technology, the CUNA Technology Council recognizes three credit unions annually for their efforts in this area. The Council recently recognized Affinity Plus Federal Credit Union of Minnesota with its “Best Practices Award” for its creation and implementation of an e-contract workflow process. The process allows for business contracts to be easily located, accessed, stored and routed.

How did they do that? And how can you emulate the process?

To achieve its goal, Affinity used a document management solution to capture contracts electronically, making them available from one central location. The credit union then automated the process that takes them from start-to-finish. Now Affinity shares information across departments and the entire company with a few clicks.

By automating time-consuming repetitive tasks, like looking for paper contracts that used to be stored in file cabinets, the credit union has more time to accomplish its goals. Examples include improving member service and empowering those members with the knowledge of how their money is being managed, furthering their trust in Affinity’s ability to do so successfully.

Affinity is looked at as a pioneer in the credit union movement. That innovative spirit is what drove it to take a slow process that used to rely on tons of paperwork and make it simple and fast by using the technology it already owned. That’s the power of a document management solution that easily integrates with any technology.

Your challenge, then, is to mirror Affinity’s efforts, turn them into best practices and start making your own credit union more efficient and effective. Not only for your employees, but for your members as well. And you can do that the same way Affinity did it:

• Improving member service by utilizing document management
• Realizing efficiencies and cost savings departmentally
• Adding more departments and rolling solutions out to the entire company

Creating ways to do business faster and more effectively lets Affinity focus on helping members achieve their goals. Affinity’s proven and repeatable solutions, utilizing the technology it already owns, is why the credit union is looked at as a leader in the industry. You can be too.

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.

Mobile ECM: Your Content In Your Pocket

// October 5th, 2011 // No Comments » // Cloud Computing, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, Food and Beverage, Government, Healthcare, Higher Education, Insurance, IT // Glenn Gibson

Put mobile ECM into the pocket of your employees

The world of computing has changed. Forever.

These days it seems archaic to have to wait until you get home or to the office just to check your email, because now your email is in your pocket. The idea of printing off maps before heading out on a journey seems crazy because GPS on our phone gives us turn-by-turn directions. Lively pop-culture debates over a pint are now a thing of the past, because we can look up the answers on the internet immediately.

Yes, mobile computing devices have changed the world and changed us.  We expect instant access to information from wherever we are. The iPhone and the iPad, Android, Windows Phone 7 and the Blackberry give us this access like never before.

So what does the explosion in mobile computing have to do with ECM?  Everything. 

Think about it. What is one of the primary driving factors behind an organization developing an ECM strategy? The need to get critical business information into the hands of the right people at the right time. That’s what ECM is all about. 

But what if the right people are in the wrong place at the wrong time? What I mean is, what if the people who are responsible for making important decisions, from approving a critical business expense to agreeing to hire the perfect candidate, can’t physically get access to the information and systems they need in order to execute business decisions, simply because they are travelling or not in the office?   

The reality is that these individuals spend a lot of time on the road and out of the office. This lack of real-time access causes bottlenecks in your processes as the decisions have to wait until they get back online. This causes on-the-fly workarounds with emails and phone calls to get someone, anyone, with authority to make the decision. And once that decision has finally been made, it is very difficult to track all the activity that supports it. 

Yup, bottlenecks and workarounds caused when people who play a critical role in business decisions are out of the office have come to be expected as a normal part of business because, until recently, that’s just how it was. There was no other choice.

But, the world of computing has changed. If the ability to access email from anywhere in the world is not only a reality, but expected in today’s world, why is it any different when thinking about your other important business content and processes?

It shouldn’t be. And when you partner with an ECM vendor who understands this, it is not.

Today you can put your ECM content in your pocket. With mobile ECM applications you are able to not only able access your important content, but also participate in business processes, reviewing, approving and denying requests from wherever you are, directly from your mobile device. 

Now it is likely, for many good reasons that you may not want to make ALL your business information available via mobile devices. If mobile access to your information is part of your requirements when you are choosing an ECM vendor, you should look for a vendor which allows you to control what type of content and processes to make available via these mobile devices. You should choose an ECM system that can truly deliver on the promise to get critical business information into the hands of the right people at the right time, wherever they happen to be.

For your business this is both simple and profound. No more waiting to get back to the office. No more driving to coffee shops just to get access to your system to approve a request. No more bottlenecks caused by business travel. No more un-documented workarounds.  

It is that simple. It is that revolutionary. Because now your content is right there in your pocket.

The Mortgage Technology Industry Today: 3 Themes in the Top Service Provider Ranking

// August 31st, 2011 // No Comments » // Financial Services // Michelle Shapiro

They say change is constant, but for mortgage lenders, that might be the understatement of the decade. Recent years have brought the highest of high and the lowest of lows. Now, every completed mortgage brings a competitive advantage to its lender and increases the lender’s chances for survival. Lenders rely on proven and cost-effective technology to assist them in getting that competitive advantage.

Since the market has started to bounce back, the corresponding trade media, like Mortgage Technology, have acknowledged that more now than ever, lenders need technology – but with no room for error, they also need help identifying what characteristics to look for in any product they pursue.

Being in the industry for quite some time now, I often look to the “top 50” list that Mortgage Technology magazine puts together annually, called the Top Service Provider list. Because of the bounce-back stage that the mortgage lending industry is in right now, I was particularly interested to see what themes would run through the list. Here are my top three observations:

1.   The category associated with a type of technology doesn’t matter.

Fifty vendors made the list, but they represent a very wide range of technology (for example, Hyland was the only enterprise content management vendor on the list). Now, I get that the list is based on which solutions have proved themselves to be innovative within the past year, but I still think it’s interesting that Mortgage Technology is sending the message that it’s not necessarily the kind of technology lenders use – it’s choosing which type of technology meets the needs of the organization.

2.   Efficiency drives business.

If the type of technology really doesn’t matter, then what does matter is how much efficiency it brings to the lender. In the short article previewing the list, the author sends the message that lenders need to look to technology to automate manual and time-consuming processes in order to increase profits. After all, the faster you can process refinances and modifications, the faster you can focus on getting new mortgages – and profits – in the door. Just as importantly, customer service levels and opportunities for new business stay high.

3.   Technology has to prove itself.

Among all the articles and even the ads in the magazine, the theme that resonated most was “proven technology is safe technology.” Lenders can’t afford to risk investing in IT that might fail a few years from now. And while there are some new players on the Top Service Provider list, looking at it, most are repeats.

To succeed in today’s lean, cost conscious, regulated industry, lenders must invest in proven technology that is user friendly, easily adoptable and results in faster loan processing for recognizing profits sooner.  Utilizing a proven, stable vendor with established roots in the financial services market, lenders and servicers will have a better chance expediting loan closing and funding and staying ahead of the competition.

Celent report: Credit unions increase core system upgrades

// August 18th, 2011 // No Comments » // Financial Services // Michelle Shapiro

 Ten percent of credit unions looked to upgrade their core banking system last year, according to a recent report by Celent. Historically, the average hovers between four or five percent.

I don’t have to tell you that changing a core isn’t exactly a small undertaking. Converting from an existing core banking platform, or even just upgrading, is a major project that impacts the entire enterprise. So why upgrade outdated legacy systems or consolidate platforms now? The market’s merger and acquisition activity has been really lively, resulting in a reevaluation of the core systems the credit unions have in place.

This report focuses just on the core, but what does this technology shifting mean for credit unions’ other systems.

The questions we’re getting from our customers are all along the same lines “if I change my core, can I still integrate ECM with the new system?” At this point in the ECM game, integrations seem like a basic thing to offer. But what’s causing many credit unions a lot of angst right now is just that – if they change their core, they have to rethink ECM, too.

But maybe that’s not such a bad thing. If credit unions don’t have a true ECM system, they’re probably up against a wall with a core provider’s document imaging component. If they decide to switch cores, or have to consolidate and share content from multiple acquired credit unions, it’s impossible to do so without getting an independent ECM solution.

So while all the acquisition in the credit union market is causing them to take another look at their core, long term it makes sense to also consider how to evolve their content management strategy. They’re growing and changing, and making sure they’re investing in an ECM solution that can grow and change with them is imperative. Credit unions can’t afford to have their content, especially member information, held in silos.

Life without ECM: One credit union’s perspective

// August 11th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Financial Services // Guest Blogger

Stephanie Baker, LAN Services Coordinator and OnBase System Administrator for Anheuser-Busch Employees Credit Union, is a long-time OnBase user (since 1996!). Here are her reflections on her credit union’s journey through ECM.

I often wonder how we at Anheuser-Busch Employees Credit Union survived in a world of paper and microfilm. Employees struggled to find information that was vital to do their jobs. And there was no central storage location to keep content in line.

But here’s what we did have: massive vaults, dusty file rooms and rusty filing cabinets. Our employees had to battle boxes and folders full of current and previous members’ documents to find what they needed.  As a result, departmental processes – including lending, member service and HR – slowed down. Finding a single document could take up to five days! Our members deserved better. 

Our credit union’s leaders knew we needed a solution to tie departments together, improve member service and ease reports processing at the same time. That’s when we turned to an electronic document management solution. 

For the past 15 years, we’ve been using a document management system. Since going through the project, it’s interesting to see how different types of organizations see different benefits from it, even between banks and credit unions like us. For us, we value that we  communicate much easier, automate reports processing and are able to respond promptly to member needs. What’s more, the constant development and enhancements to the system has kept us right on the cutting edge of ECM technology.

As the world grows more mobile, document management has become critical to serving members that may have signed up for an account in Missouri but have since moved to California. This is just one example of a business problem that we encountered and were able to address because we had this system in place. It’s amazing how the software has been growing and changing with us since we bought it 15 years ago.