Top 11 Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Benefits

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Written By Haisam Abdel Malak
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Enterprise content management (ECM) benefits are vast since it allows businesses to manage information from creation to disposal. As the amount, velocity, and variety of information grows, companies are always looking for the best ECM system to help them effectively manage their content.

ECM benefits include the ability to easily access documents inside a searchable centralized digital repository, automate critical organizational procedures, and meet regulatory requirements with advanced security measures.

Enterprise content management (ECM) is important for all types of organizations because it allows them to go beyond traditional document management by providing an integrated enterprise solution for managing the entire life cycle of information, automating content-centric business processes, and enabling records management.

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Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Benefits

Implementing ECM best practices and following up with the latest enterprise content management trends might be at first a time-consuming and labor-intensive endeavor. However, once the solution has been properly installed, the related advantages are vast.

Organizations frequently realize the advantages of successfully implementing enterprise content management when employees are more productive, information is safe and secure, no documents are lost, no data breaches occur, documents can be shared safely and easily with other colleagues or external entities, and so on.

The 11 enterprise content management benefits are:

1- Increase Productivity

Professionals spend 50% of their time searching for information and take on an average, 18 minutes to locate each document.

Gartner Research

Information workers waste a significant amount of time dealing with a variety of challenges related to working with documents. This wasted time amounts to a loss of 21.3% in the organization’s total productivity.

IDC

According to AIIM, companies may achieve an increase of 18% in productivity from utilizing a content services platform. Check out this guide, if you want to be surprised by more ECM statistics.

Document management is one of the most important ECM benefits, and it should be incredibly simple. Locating documents should take only a few seconds, allowing information workers to concentrate on other productive duties.

2- Minimize Risks

This is one of the most significant advantages of enterprise content management.

By limiting document access and authorization, an ECM strategy enables enterprises to prevent data breaches and reduce the danger of information getting into the wrong hands.

Compliance requirements for some types of documents are required, and failure to conform to certain regulatory laws can result in large penalties and, in some circumstances, legal action.

Proper implementation can assist your organization in lowering the risk of non-compliance with various regulatory standards such as HIPPA and GDPR.

Major market suppliers provide the option to encrypt data and files kept in the central repository, limiting content viewing to within their solution.

Check out the article below covering best practices for document security

Boost Your DOCUMENT SECURITY With These Tips (theecmconsultant.com)

3- Reduce Storage and Operational Costs

Achieving a paper-free office is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible; nonetheless, transitioning from paper to digital documents provides a paper-lite atmosphere.

The average business’s document volume doubles every three years, resulting in a 22 percent yearly paper rise.

One of the most significant ECM benefits is that it allows enterprises to minimize the quantity of paper and physical storage space necessary, resulting in significant reductions in filing time and associated expenses (shipping, storage, etc.).

4- Document Management & Version Control

Employees can easily lose a document, work on an outdated version, or cannot revert to prior versions without document management tools to oversee the organization’s document lifecycle.

Version control is a significant capacity in the list of enterprise content management features.

The following are some of the most important ECM benefits.

  • Make numerous versions of a document.
  • When editing a document, lock it to prevent changes from being overwritten.
  • Keep track of who changed what and when.
  • Ensure that employees are constantly working on the most up-to-date version.
  • The ability to revert to prior versions if necessary.
  • Support the idea of minor and major document versioning.

Check out the page below for a comprehensive list of recommended practices for dealing with versions.

Master Your DOCUMENT VERSION CONTROL in 5 Minutes (theecmconsultant.com)

5- Improved Regulatory Compliance

Records Management and retention policies help control the creation, declaration, classification, retention, and destruction of content and business records, resulting in improved compliance, minimized litigation risk, and lower storage costs.

With these benefits, businesses should be able to handle both information retention and disposal, allowing them to remain compliant with complex, constantly updated requirements..

6- Automate Business Processes

In today’s digital age, business process automation is a necessity. Organizations cannot continue to operate manually for fear of losing time, and productivity, and becoming victims of office bureaucracy.

Having the benefits of automated document-centric processes in the same system where you handle all of your organization’s documents is a huge benefit.

Depending on the department, streamlining these workflows might result in significant cost savings by removing redundant steps, increased staff retention, and speedier day-to-day operations.

The current trend is low-code automation, which allows business users to take control of their operations. Non-IT workers may begin automating their workflows and developing forms utilizing the tools offered without requiring IT intervention.

The automation of processes within the system can reduce cycle times and increase employee productivity, both of which have a significant financial impact.

A typical example was observed in one of our clients’ implementations, where fines due to delays in official paperwork were reduced from a couple of millions to almost nothing.

If you are interested in process automation, I strongly recommend reading the article below.

What is Business Process Automation? The Complete Guide (theecmconsultant.com)

7- Improved & Secure Collaboration

Document sharing, whether internally or publicly, is a regular day-to-day job in every firm.

The majority of businesses continue to rely on email or cloud technologies to complete this task.

However, this raises a number of difficulties, including the danger of losing track of what was shared, commented on, and the exact document version to review, as well as the security risk of having the document transmitted to unauthorized individuals.

Having a collaboration module throughout your organization’s documents allows users to work on the same document in a centralized controlled environment while ensuring only authorized users have access.

Some solutions target completely simple collaboration (sharing documents for read-only or edit), and comments, while others address complex collaboration capabilities such as real-time parallel collaboration, redlining, content redaction, and markups.

8- Integration with 3rd Party Applications

Employees today utilize a range of business applications in their daily tasks, and having connectors with the majority of your applications is a requirement.

To transfer content around, they integrate with the majority of popular line of business applications. MS Office, Office365, SAP, Salesforce, EFSS tools, and other major connections are available.

Tip: When assessing a provider, develop a list of your most often used vital applications and ensure that integration with these applications is present in the list of enterprise content management features.

9- Artificial Intelligence Adoption

Artificial intelligence is changing our daily lives and has the potential to play a significant role in information management, resulting in increased productivity, efficiency, and cost savings.

Including sophisticated cognitive technologies in the list of enterprise content management benefits will help companies to automate classification, capture, extract metadata, redact material (hide personal identification information), and much more.

10- Make Better Decisions Faster

Software with an intuitive user interface, a powerful BPM module, and a notification engine should be able to send the correct information to the right person at the right time and place, allowing enterprises to remain ahead of their competition by reacting to events quicker and better.

11- Going Green

Nowadays, all enterprises must consider the environmental effect of their operations.

Organizations will not only cut paper usage, but also the resource consumption and carbon footprint of storage facilities, office buildings, transportation, and printed goods, so contributing to making the world a better place.

Conclusion

The advantages of enterprise content management (ECM) might have a significant effect on your company’s operations. ECM has a bright future because we value it as the foundation of every path toward digital transformation.

2 thoughts on “Top 11 Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Benefits”

  1. Very nice informative article and i have recommended it to my students. Sylivester Sennabulya

    Reply

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