SME: Document Management
SME: Document Management
Document management is not just for the 10,000-seat organisation. Businesses that want to grow efficiently can also benefit from early adoption of good processes.
First, what is an SME? Small to Medium-sized Enterprise. But hold on, isn’t ‘Enterprise’ the top level of organisation? OK, so an SME is also an SMB (Small to Medium-sized Business). Both SME and SMB. In Australia, according to the Department for Communications, Technology and the Arts (DCITA): “For the purposes of major ICT contracts, SMEs are defined as a body corporate incorporated in Australia or New Zealand and having average annual revenue of less than $500 million over the last four years”. That would appear to be 99% of all Australian companies. We’re using the European Union’s ruling that an SME is an organisation consisting of up to 500 people. Within this criterion will be companies that are split into branches and workgroups – and even Enterprise-level business units operating semi-autonomously.
The point of fact is that documents need to be managed in order to extract the greatest efficiencies from them. Also, for the sake of this piece we will take Chris Lynch of Interwoven’s description of a document as opposed to a record: “A document means live information in any recorded form. A record is static, normally archived information in any form.”
Starting The Process
Eden Living, based in Adelaide’s inner suburb of Fullarton, has a reputation as an innovative Builder, always seeking to set new benchmarks in design and customer service. Peter Eden, the Principal has always invested in new technology and was frustrated by the constraints of the current system. “Coming from large corporate environments, I was used to having one or two central printers and everyone collected their printing from them,” said Paul Cole, Financial Controller at Eden Living. “When I came here, I could see that things needed to change. I approached a few vendors and said, ‘I’ve inherited an office with 10 printers attached to people’s PCs. I want a real printing solution.’”
When starting the process, you should also bear in mind how you are going to assess the end-result - the deliverables. For many organisations this comes down to two things: ROI (Return On Investment) or KPI (Key Performance Indictor). The former is a spreadsheet calculation, requiring tight budgetary tracking across the deal. The second, which is widely used in the United States and is making its way into ANZ business processes as a better way to make sense of outsourced ‘intangibles’ early in the process ties closely to Service Level Agreements. As Pauline Webb of the City of Canada Bay council points out when talking about its adoption of Avand’s DataWorks webforms to improve its document management challenges: “The council had recently implemented SLAs across the board, so we opted for KPI rather than ROI as our major budgetary assement.” Kevin Nonweiler of Mossman Council, while tendering for the same Avand product took a tighter approach: “The tender process of the day involved responses from about 20 different vendors covering all aspects of the tender. As regards CST and Records, Council had responses from eight vendors. We opted for both ROI and KPI.” The choice, as the purchases is yours - and so, of course, is the power.
Listening To The Tender
Chris Gorey, CEO of Avand, points up the importance of the vendor being informed: “We learn about their business to understand what business problems we are solving. We learn that the risks around change management and project management are different for each site and what we need to do to achieve a good business outcome for them.” As the purchaser, you can make the relationship work in your favour as well. A long term understanding of your processes pays off as the organisation’s needs grow.
Back at Eden Living, Mr Cole approached Canon among other vendors. Canon suggested not only a printing solution, but an imaging philosophy which incorporated a document management system. “Canon covered not only printing, but also document management, which I hadn’t thought.” says Mr Cole. He saw that this consolidation of printing equipment would prove to be a real business benefit for Eden Living, as it could replace its two old photocopiers for two new black and white multifunction devices (iR2220i and iR3320i) and one colour (iR C3200) for less than the business was paying for the old set up. The only extra cost incurred by the Eden Living on top of its usual spending was for the software.
The Workload
“When I announced the new environment, I got all the usual grumbles about people having to get out of their chairs to pick up printing, but I pointed out that it’s not a bad thing,” said Mr Cole. “To get people up and out of their seat and mixing with other people in the office is actually a very good thing.” Office interaction aside, the new devices are also helping Eden Living to plough through an enormous amount of printed material on a daily basis. When a new home is being built, for example, Eden Living has to print the plans and specifications seven or eight times at an average of 20 pages of A3 or A4 paper, per home, in addition to all the routine office paperwork. “Now, once an invoice is scanned, it’s in the system and, if you know the invoice number, you can pull it up on your screen in seconds, rather than spend hours, or even days, waiting for it to be found.”
Order from Chaos
Document Management does not have to entail full-service solutions however. Sometimes, one small change will lead to better processes. In the case of National Lending Solutions (NLS) that change was to a single, centralised database for its highly confidential customer records. The firm processed more than 1,500 transactions per month. It needed to achieve the following without incurring a huge cost of ownership:
• Manage its files.
• Allow easy access to those files on demand.
• Reduce the risk of re-keying errors.
• Provided risk management
• Ensure it would not overreach its production capacity.
As you would expect from a law firm specialising in a highly legislated market, risk management was a major factor. When data is constantly re-worked, it is at risk of errors which can lead to compliance issues and in turn create large financial and legal issues.
NLS researched the available software solutions which fit its budget requirements. FileMaker Pro (FMP) as chosen because it was an off-the-shelf cost effective solution that would work with its Macintoshes but also be capable of data transfer to the more widely-used PC platform. FMP also provides managed customisation enabling data entry, reporting and database taxonomies to be tailored to individual client needs. A FileMaker developer was employed to customise FileMaker Pro for NLS.
Documents, Managed
The sometimes painful initial planning and implementation phase was easy with limited downtime. With the planning in place, it took approximately three weeks for the system to be installed and running. Cycle times for key transactions were halved in each of the 30,000-record databases. A further benefit was the extraction of a wide range of information from the databases which can be used in the customised reporting. It also enables NLS to be consistent in its output of documents and track everything it has done. “Another very important thing is that we use it to manage information and disseminate information to our clients through our FileMaker web interface,” says Michael Noyce, CEO of National Lending Solutions. A key element of this is the firm’s customised website, MasterSearch.
So, depending on your requirements, there are a variety of methodologies and processes to choose from. Bear in mind that good third-party relationships combined with a clear understanding of what you need to achieve will pay huge dividends as your requirements scale-up.
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