18 posts tagged “ecm”

CFS will provide ECM solutions to customers in the Bristol and South West areas of the United Kingdom.

Laserfiche welcomes Copier and Facsimile Systems, Ltd. (CFS) as the newest authorized Value Added Reseller (VAR) to provide enterprise content management (ECM) solutions to customers in the Bristol and South West areas of the UK.

CFS Director Graham Withers said, “As a leading supplier of business technologies, we have an excellent track record of supplying state-of-the-art solutions that integrate seamlessly with existing organizational IT environments.” He added, “Laserfiche has a suite of award-winning Enterprise content management products that we’re proud to offer our clients, along with ongoing training and support that will help us succeed.”

Laserfiche Senior Vice President of Business Development Chris Wacker said, “As a company that has been committed to providing outstanding document solutions since 1985, CFS has the experience and capability to help numerous organizations in the financial, education and commercial markets succeed with the Laserfiche product suite. We’re pleased to welcome them to our five-star VAR channel.”

ECM: The budget crunch is upon all of us, and, as a result, we’re all looking at where the little efficiencies are to stretch our existing dollars as far as possible. With Laserfiche ECM there are many aspects to consider when making decisions.

Repositories and licenses cost money. So does scanning. How can we best use our existing resources?

Change your repository settings!

Changing your repository options, specifically the ‘logout automatically’ option, will prevent your users from becoming license hogs. That person who logs in and then leaves for lunch will be logged off automatically, freeing up a license for another user.

In Hampton, we’ve adopted a 1:5 user license ratio for both FX and RX licenses. Due to the fact that licenses are concurrent, we believe that it’s reasonable to expect that any user, particularly retrieve or read-only users, will access enterprise content management, find what they need and then exit the system.

What kind of scanning devices do you have available?

While scanners are “the” option when it comes to high quantity document capture, almost all types of copy machines have scanning capability and can easily scan to e-mail. Ask your IT Department or manufacturer representative to set the image to either tiff or pdf and add all users to the email setting.

Even if all of your office staff are not enterprise content management users, being able to copy/scan to e-mail prevents the proliferation of paper, which could be another significant cost savings for you.

Do all of your users know, enterprise content management and understand how to use Laserfiche’s e-mail utility?

This again will decrease the proliferation of paper in your office and to your clients or the public.

Are you fully utilizing your LSAP?

Your time is valuable to your employer and we all pay for software support. When you have questions, contact your reseller and employ their assistance with answers and best practices. You don’t have to figure it out on your own.

What’s in ECM?

If Laserfiche has become the new dumping ground (in addition to your network, pc’s, and ancillary devices…) then your data – and your server – could use some basic management.

1. Purge your data; set up your Records Management Edition if you have it – practice good records management!
2. Check your folder structure.
3. Manage your volumes.
4. Use your Column Display wisely.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) consists of the strategies and methods used to manage and interpret documents related to work in an organization.

In today’s information age, the success and failure of an enterprise is dictated primarily by two factors – the rate of influx of data into an enterprise database and the constant interpreting and evaluation of this data into logical information as input for strategic planning.

As unstructured content is checked in and out of a system, each use can potentially add to the content's profile. With time, the ECM system might gradually adopt new filtering, which assists in making better decisions, determining the relevance of information and documents.

For example, in order to improve efficiency while still adhering to Federal Laws and guidelines, an eminent South Western US University turned to implement Enterprise Content Management. The university used ECM to bring business processes together and accelerate information exchange. This solution not only helped the university to ensure efficient administration, it also minimized the impact on staff—improving productivity and reducing costs.

According to the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), Enterprise Content Management can be broken down into five major components:

• Capture: Obtain and organize information.
• Manage: Process and employ information as per requirement.
• Store: Temporary back up of transient information.
• Preserve: More permanent storage of unchanging data.
• Deliver: Provide clients and end users with requested data and analyses.

While identifying a direct return on investment can be difficult, it is possible to see the impacts of the improved process efficiency. With the enforced usage of these tools within the organization, they become part of the work culture. What's the ROI on a fax-machine? Virtually negligible, per se. However, who can imagine running an organization without one?

It's not enough to simply maintain and hold extensive database information. Content must be managed so that it can be used to achieve business goals, which is the goal behind implementation of Enterprise Content Management.

Their decision to go paperless with ECM was driven not by cost or budget issues, but by the desire to grow their business, tame a paper monster that was consuming every available square foot of office space, improve customer service, and keep up with a rapidly-changing financial planning industry.

In their view, they had no choice as to whether to go paperless with ECM. They must go paperless if you want to survive and thrive in the financial planning industry. They were slowly becoming buried in paper, running out of space and spending valuable time looking for missing files. And as their investment business grew, their paper mushroomed, due to trade confirmations and quarterly investment statements. When their broker-dealer conducted our annual audit in 2004, it took a long time to find required forms. That’s when they knew they had to make changes.

At Texas Christian University’s annual student job fair, Blake Woodard was manning a booth when he ran into a local Laserfiche reseller.

“I had looked at several systems,” Woodard says, “but Laserfiche offered us the greatest flexibility to work like we always had, only using enterprise content management files instead of paper. Laserfiche used TIFF files instead of proprietary file formats and used SQL as its underlying database, which gave us the ability to move our data to a different system later if we needed to. Also, the SQL platform is scalable as our electronic storage needs grow.”

Woodard Insurance purchased enterprise content management software and installed it immediately. Transition to the new system was relatively quick, given that there was an existing document management system in place, just not a digital one. Client securities files had been moved from paper file folders to three-ring binders with topical dividers and, when it came time to implement a digital solution, this interim step made the process much easier.

Where the old paper files were in strict chronological order, the topical divisions in the client binders made organizing Laserfiche’s filing structure much simpler. “We immediately began writing scanning procedures that covered the naming, indexing and location of each document in a binder,” says Woodard. These flexible procedures are updated and refined as employees encounter new situations or better ideas.

Enterprise Content Management Solutions for Your Industry

Many organizations hesitate to implement ECM solutions because of the problems of implementing best practices and standardizing operations enterprise-wide. Each department, each regional office and each workgroup has its own ways of doing business, and they often fear it will force them to change the way they work. Information ends up in multiple locations, with no way for the central office to sort it all out. And the system ends up compounding the problems it was supposed to solve.

Rio Enterprise Content Management : Balancing Flexibility with Control

The Rio ECM system is different. Because Laserfiche Rio fits your existing business processes into an enterprise framework, it gives you the control you need and the flexibility you want. Rio organically expands throughout your organization, regardless of your industry:

State and Local Government: Highly scalable enterprise solutions for cities and counties of all sizes.

Federal Government: Proven technology to meet the business process management and information security needs of federal agencies and departments.

Financial Services: Straight-through processing platforms to fit the needs of field representatives, OSJ offices and home offices, as well as enterprise solutions for RIAs, banks and trust companies.

Healthcare: Automated solutions to simplify billing, patient records management and admissions, designed for ambulatory care centers, hospitals and third-party billing organizations.

Rio offers your organization the strength of a proven information management system, the technology of a highly sophisticated business process management engine and the support of the Laserfiche community—with the flexibility to meet the needs of multiple departments and users.

In order to stay competitive during the economic downturn, executives involved in ECM say their company plans to reduce operating expenses and improve cash flow. Effectively managing enterprise content management processes can help meet these objectives, particularly with reducing expenses.

ECM accelerates the flow of information throughout an enterprise which simplifies administration, installation and support IT. Enterprise content management systems help organizations better manage their information, but systems is intended to standardize business processes that often end up confined to just one or two departments, because they simply aren’t flexible enough to meet the diverse needs of individual departments and offices.

Companies have realized that the potential for enterprise content management is one the best practices to yield benefits such as lower operating expenses, which can help them to survive and thrive in the days ahead.

This blog is for information purpose only, and should not be trea

ted a professional advise or price protection guarantee. This blog is mainly used to help our customers blog their information to the readers who may find articles listed on this blog interesting, Intact Info Solutions may also use this blog for commercial purpose or for higher search engine ranking via SEO-search engine optimization or website optimization - web 2.0 search technology. It is advised that readers seek professional consultation in the field of interest for more information.

Spire Investment Partners uses ECM to recruit new advisors

“If financial advisors aren’t talking to people, they’re not making money,” says Paul Murphy, National Sales Director at Spire Investment Partners, LLC. Murphy’s problem was that his top earners were spending too much time staying on top of the paperwork that comes with handling over $1 billion in client assets, which he expects to at least double this year. “It’s the regulators. It’s the auditors. The paper starts to pile up from the first client meeting and all the way through the process,” he says.

For Murphy, his previous experience integrating two large broker-dealers had shown how the right technology ultimately leads to success. “If you want to succeed in this business, you’ve got to get great technology,” he says. “Using technology not only defensively, but offensively, is very near and dear to my heart.”

Murphy and Phillip Fournier, Spire’s Chief Operating Officer, went on the offensive and decided to invest in a enterprise content management system. They chose ECM not just to manage paper, but also as a tool to cut costs and increase services—which would eventually help recruit both clients and advisors.

Murphy says that, at first, just the idea of a new system and way of doing things intimidated the firm’s advisors. “How many people have said ‘paperless’ in front of advisors and had them say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me’? That’s where we started,” he admits.

But, once apprehensive advisors, and more importantly, their sales and service assistants, began using enterprise content management and saw how easy and efficient it was, implementation and initial roll-out went smoothly.

National Sales Director Paul Murphy

Murphy credits the training his staff received from the firm’s Laserfiche reseller, One Source/ADI, for easing the implementation process. “I can’t say enough good things about the training. The results are great.” In the 18 months since the firm implemented ECM, Spire has scanned documents from approximately 80% of their offices – with nearly all of their advisors and staff using the system regularly.

“The goal,” says Murphy, “is to apply technology to make work easier. Efficient process flow obviously increases efficiency. If everyone is more efficient, they’re happier. If they’re happier, they’re more productive. If they’re more productive, you’re more profitable.”

With document management, Murphy immediately noticed that Service Assistants and back office personnel were able to respond to client inquiries much more efficiently. ECM is the way to make them more productive,” says Murphy. “We’re very happy that our staff is better able to process workflow and therefore better able to support our Consultants.”

This blog is for information purpose only, and should not be treated a professional advise or price protection guarantee. This blog is mainly used to help our customers blog their information to the readers who may find articles listed on this blog interesting, Intact Info Solutions may also use this blog for commercial purpose or for higher search engine ranking via SEO-search engine optimization or website optimization - web 2.0 search technology. It is advised that readers seek professional consultation in the field of interest for more information.