You’ve seen ads for high-end closet systems on TV and in a number of magazines—the closets with matching hangers all facing the same way, the drawers that slide open so smoothly, holding color coordinated clothing and perfectly stacked items. An obsessive compulsive’s dream, these products hold the promise of organizing your closet to make sure your blue cashmere sweater can be spotted with ease. A document management (DM) system works much the same way.

DM solutions effectively take a company’s paper and digital documents, scan them to create electronic files, categorize or index them, and store them on a central database for quick, efficient retrieval across multiple locations and users. Although the terminology varies by vendor and market—from DM to information relationship management (IRM) to full enterprise content management (ECM) suite—DM has become an essential facet of many businesses and verticals, especially transactional fields such as healthcare, financial, legal, and insurance markets.

"As few as five years ago, many people still had no idea what document management was, but then it was still a choice," says Jim Thumma, VP of sales, marketing, and professional services, Optical Image Technology, Inc. (OIT) "Today, whether you want it or not, you need it. The world converted to digital a long time ago, and to compete or just simply survive, you need a way to manage not only the mail, but the fax, the email, the voice files, the video, etc."

"DM solutions aren’t really about just converting paper documents into electronic files anymore," says Laurie Shufeldt, VP of strategic business development, FileVision. "It’s more about managing all types of information essential to operating a business efficiently and running your business with that information as an asset. DM solutions that only managed documents five years ago should now be solutions that increase company’s overall productivity."

Rewards
A DM solution can bring documents to the hands of your staff and customers with speed and ease. An invoice can be in the hands of a foreman in your manufacturing plant in Hong Kong and a sales office in the States. Key medical data and X-rays can be accessed from a patient’s doctor in Chicago or an emergency room in Philadelphia.

"Recent studies have shown that companies spend anywhere from ten to 15 percent of their revenue on document-related costs," notes Colman Murphy, senior product manager, DocuShare Business Unit, Xerox Corporation. "This is three times the average amount they invest in R&D." He adds, "Businesses produce more than 4.5 trillion hard-copy pages a year. Knowledge workers spend 20 percent of their day looking for information in documents, and 50 percent of that time they can’t find what they’re looking for. Fortunately document technology and capabilities are evolving at a drastic rate and the potential this evolution has for business improvement is huge."

Greg Schloemer, president, Docu- Ware, tells us that DocuWare’s typical DM solution is installed and up-and-running—including training—in just a few days. "Benefits include empowering your employees with knowledge, improving quality, improving services, and all while adding to improved productivity and efficiency, which in turn add to the bottom line." He shares an example, "Imagine if your employee could answer a question from one of your customers immediately, without having to call that customer back. The employee has all the information at his desk and can immediately respond. Your customer is satisfied and more likely to return with repeat business and perhaps even recommend your company to one of his associates. Your employee is happier and more satisfied with their job. They are less likely to be disgruntled or leave your employ, and you do not incur additional personnel costs for recruiting, training, etc. Lastly, your employees are more efficient and productive, allowing them to do more so that you can grow without adding additional personnel."

Thumma highlights some of the benefits attainable with DM. "Document management helps businesses to work faster and smarter; to find what they need whenever they need it; to eliminate tasks and duplicate information; to provide immediate and accurate information to their constituents, both internal and external." Thumma notes other rewaards such as less spending on consumables and the ability to have staff work on more meaningful activities, rather than filing and searching for information.

Dave Lakness, VP of business development, Laserfiche, refers to one customer in the financial services industry, Transamerica, which has salespeople at several disparate locations across the country and benefits from DM technology. With Laserfiche’s DM system installed for more than 5,000 users, employees at Transamerica’s headquarters can view new account applications from anywhere in the country the same day they are filled out. New applications and other documents are either created in a program such as Microsoft Word with digital signatures or paper forms are filled out and captured. Then connected users can post the files to Transamerica, or a non-networked user can post the files at a later time when they have access to the company network.

DM solutions help some businesses save money, please customers, and grow exponentially, says Thumma. "As the economy has softened in many industries, effective DM has enabled companies to cut costs while enhancing services, and to grow the base of customers and their data without adding staff," he says. "Some companies find that document management enables them to be so efficient that they are able to be in the acquiring position of other companies rather than being a company that is likely to be acquired."

Unavoidable Technology
With the Sarbanes Oxley Act—now enforced on SMBs—the demands for traceable and auditable reports on cue have become a legal mandate. The Gramm-Leach-Blilely Act requires accountability for the use of customer data. These regulations, The Patriot Act, and more—particularly in fields such as legal and healthcare that house great amounts of private customer data—have made DM an unavoidable technology for most.

"Strict government and industry regulations have had an enormous impact on customer needs and the resulting technology developments," notes Thumma. "In the wake of scandals such as Enron, compliance is no longer a luxury, but rather a necessity, both for the protection of the company and for its constituents."

Lakness says the automation of reports can mean an enormous saving of time and money in dealing with these mandates. "Manual discovery is incredibly expensive. We’ve done quite a bit of work to offer automation capability."

Shufeldt notes the importance of DM as a compliance handler, but stresses that DM should be used for much more. "In today’s business world, companies shouldn’t buy a system because it helps with security or compliance. They should buy it with the approach that it should improve their overall business operations and productivity; and as a bi-product of the solution, security and compliance result from the new practices and way information is stored, managed, and accessed."

Shufeldt adds that in contrast to the landscape of five years ago, when DM was commonly used only in key record-keeping departments like accounting, "An overall information management system should be used today by every department and be an overall application for the business."

Workflow
In a successful application, workflow should be enhanced, not disrupted with a DM system. "Workflow should be so tightly integrated within the DM system that there is no actual difference between a workflow solution and the DM solution. They should be one," says Shufeldt. "When that document goes into the system, the system should know exactly what should be done with the document, who should be handling it, and what the timing should be...DM in itself should be part of a greater information management system that manages the document and other information stored in the system."

"Ideally, a DM system should match and accelerate the customer’s existing workflow, rather than re-engineer it," notes Wendy Gibson, CMO, Skywire Software. "The goal of many of our customers is to automate as much of their workflow as they can. They don’t want to have to change the way they work to fit the software; they want software that fits them."

"A document management system changes the flow of work, as you know it today, by making information readily available," says Thumma. "If you add an electronic workflow application to your DM application, you can truly revolutionize your business. The possibilities are only limited by the company’s ability to dream and to communicate its needs with a vendor who can make the dreams become reality."

"We pride ourselves on being able to adapt to the current workflow that has been established," says Lakness. He notes that many of the organizations Laserfiche services are built from acquisitions. The various entities of the new companies have multiple incumbent systems, and Laserfiche adapts to their multiple legacy systems. "Rapid application delivery tools are easily configured to embrace both content and metadata that’s contained in existing systems before our DM system is installed and make them part of our directory." The company also has a workflow automation product to enhance the workflow process.

"If a content and DM system does not offer workflow, then it should not be taken seriously," says Jim Krzywicki, CEO, Treeno Soft-ware. "Companies are alive with activity. Information and content are continuously moving throughout a company for approval and/or action. Workflow capabilities are imperative."

Spreading the Word
The use of digital documents and DM systems has evolved tremendously over the past five to ten years.

"Five years ago, it was let’s get rid of the paper," notes Toni Eddelman, senior solutions marketing manager, EMC Corporation. "Now we’re seeing a shift. As soon as paper comes in, companies scan it and get it in the system to eliminate redundancies." She says that DM demand in the transactional CM space is the ECM category that is growing the most.

"There has been steady growth in demand as organizations adopt ever higher standards of compliance and the need for transparency between customers, partners, regulators, and organizations increase," notes Chris Rasmussen, president and CEO, Interprise. He notes incremental changes over recent years, "We’ve gone from integrating front and back office applications to integrating internal or external use of applications such as connecting back office with external partners enabled through Web 2.0."

"I think that what’s occurring is the front office of a company is connected today," says Lakness. He adds, "Since the audit rules have become more transparent, all companies now have a higher degree of responsibility to keep records of communications on the front line. This is dramatically different than even in the ‘90s when branch offices had less connection to the home office."

To get a grasp of what customers need, Laserfiche participates very broadly in a number of industry organizations, including law enforcement, insurance, municipal government, federal agencies, and healthcare administration. Employees attend and take part in regional meetings and other events where best practices are discussed and ideas are exchanged about how documents are processed. Lakness notes that—particularly in federal agencies—not only are the requirements and geographical distributions different, but the vocabulary for some of the same terms are different. To handle this, Laserfiche has a specific team to handle each of the specialized markets. This team incorporates the common market language into the DM system.

A Managed Future
DM and complimentary technologies should continue to become more mainstream, bringing benefits to users across multiple industries and workforce sizes. A lower initial investment is just one of the adoption drivers. Because of financial constraints, Shufeldt notes, "Five years ago, many organizations from SMBs to smaller departments within organizations were using home grown solutions, or outdated paper-driven processes and not document management technology of any kind."

"Moving toward the future, hopefully you will see more companies truly embrace the digital records technologies such as DM, records management, e-discovery, business process management, and workflow software, which will allow them to converge both data-driven and document/object-driven applications, providing fluid information wherever it is needed," says Thumma.

"Most important, employees can focus on important and revenue generating tasks like customer service and sales with the time freed-up through the use of a document management system," notes Krzywicki.