Enterprise Content Management

Gathered files and documents are sorted into the suitable groups and are made accessible solely to those authorised with the authorisation system. Document management here includes the whole life cycle of a file and prevents accidental simultaneous editing by different people thanks to a check-out system to your personal desk.

Documents and files can be found by users thanks to a high-performance full text search. A key feature and also a big advantage of an ECM system for the user is that the documents you need are available to you in a matter of seconds.

With storage, the focus lies on short to mid-term retention of data and documents rather than archiving. Documents are no longer saved manually by users on network drives, but are automatically filed and organised via a client. Even if their are several versions of a document or file, there is still only one actual file made available to the user. This means that storage silos are dissolved and tedious searches in different network drive structures are eliminated.

The document needed can be called up either with a search function or via other attributes (e.g. click finder) in the ECM client. Here it doesn’t matter where a file is saved or how it is named – only what is inside it and which attributes or workflows are assigned to it.

The need for companies to invest in large rooms full of filing cabinets and boxes is a thing of the past. With Enterprise Content Management, your company generates and manages a digital archive in real time almost automatically. Unlike traditional data storage, the focus is not on long-term archiving. Existing analogue archives can be digitised and assigned keywords and can be structured practically automatically using OCR recognition.

Thanks to defined rules, as soon as you then create a new analogue or digital document, it is easy to determine whether it’s a new versioning of an existing file or whether it needs to be archived and put into long-term storage. ECM also allows companies to automatically set retention and deletion deadlines, giving you one less thing to think about in future.

Get all the decision makers (CEOs, controllers, finance department etc.) and future users involved. The introduction of an Enterprise Content Management system enables lots of new possibilities, savings and efficiency but also means a lot of changes for users. Powerful, modern, wide-reaching technologies often fail because of a low level of acceptance by users. Involving users early on to get them on board and to build familiarity lets you be sure that the new technology will be accepted.

Especially interfaces and external applications should not be overlooked. Modern Enterprise Management systems are not closed solutions – they are highly integrative and communicate via corresponding interfaces with DATEV, for example, and with many other systems. All technical requirements should be laid out in a specification sheet. Ideally, such a requirement specification should be etablished at the very beginning and supplemented if necessary.