Life without ECM: One credit union’s perspective
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.
