ECM manages the entire life cycle of an organization’s content, including documents, spreadsheets, contracts, and scanned images. It’s a term encompassing the technology, strategy, and method used to capture, manage, integrate, store, and ultimately deliver information.
The enterprise content management industry has been growing steadily over the past several years and is expected to hit over $32 billion in revenue by 2027. Here we will look at both ECM and a similar process, document management systems, that are designed to solve many common organizational difficulties.
Document Management and You
The information technology industry today is full of acronyms and abbreviations. We hear acronyms like CMS for Content Management System, DMS for Document Management System, and ECM for Enterprise Content Management all the time. But do we really understand the differences between these systems?
Before finalizing a system to manage your content, it is crucial to understand the various systems and their scopes. Managing documents and content looks different for every company. Having a basic knowledge of the solutions available will only help when deciding which will benefit your company the most.
Document Management VS Enterprise Content Management
A DMS can be described as content services that are flexible and often cloud-based offerings that enable effective access to, use of, and management of information across the organization by users, processes, and applications.
Before the technological revolution we live in today, a DMS was nothing more than a filing cabinet. For many companies, this may still be the case. A DMS, however, provides quicker access to documents while helping to reduce the overhead involved in the storage, maintenance, and time spent handling physical documents.
ECM is a broader system and refers to the overall approach you use to systematically organize all of your company’s content, structured or not.
ECM attempts to organize all your company’s assets, memos, presentations, videos, and spreadsheets, any document your business produces. These are saved in a variety of formats like PDF’s, Word documents, and images so that they are readily available and easily accessible.
Like any other business asset, all your content must be managed. For it to be useful over time, it needs to be organized, searchable, and secure.
A successful ECM helps you tackle changes in technology and the way we work, and combats information silos by delivering the right information to the right people at the right time. Both the systems, ECM and DMS, are enterprise-level solutions that help increase efficiency, reduce processing time, minimize operational costs, and streamline internal processes.
Why Do I Need ECM?
Most companies determine that they need a strategic ECM solution after they have identified an overarching business challenge. This could be handling too much paper or unstructured information that causes bottlenecks when trying to process, access, or store the information.
If it takes a lot of time to retrieve documents and other files, you will benefit from a centralized document storage solution that makes searching for documents easier. If your business is heavily regulated, an ECM would help your business remain compliant.
Waltz Can Help You Find Your Business Document Solution
- The Solutions Specialists at Waltz are ready to help you manage your document workflow.
- Business Analysis to discover possible inefficiencies within workflow automation
- Process Improvement Plan
- Tailored Document Management Solutions that are unique to your business
- Training on industry-leading software
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