Part 5 – A Viable Solution

Realizing the benefits of effectively organizing and indexing documents is only the tip of the iceberg when you consider the possibilities provided by a fully-featured document management system.  I have witnessed how companies have successfully refocused their employees from performing unproductive roles like constantly searching lost documents into roles that directly derive revenue for the organization.

Here are a few ways that document management helps your organization:

• Workflow – Eliminates manually routing documents for approval and physical signature.  Through automated workflow solutions documents are automatically routed to individuals for approval and digital signatures.  This includes an electronic audit trail and provides remote users easy access to approve documents.

• eDiscovery – The threat of litigation against companies and the associated subpoena of documents is a nightmare scenario for many companies.  If your company employs document management policies and tools for document indexing, records retention management, and document distribution, inquires for information can be handled quickly and efficiently.

• Document Scanning – By digitally scanning and archiving paper documents in your organization you gain great efficiencies searching on documents while providing a simple means of business continuity through disaster recovery.

• Version Control – When creating documents using a version control system, the author can record snapshots of their document at any point in the document lifecycle. This permits the author to lock in a version of the document for historical purposes that can be referenced later in the development cycle.

• Subscriptions – Receive automatic email messages notifying you when documents are modified or added into the system. 

ColumbiaSoft Document Locator is one such system with a proven track record of helping companies organize their documents.  ColumbiaSoft Document Locator provides a document management system that is integrated directly into Microsoft Windows 7 and Microsoft Office.  The ingenious design creates a user interface that appears in Windows like a shared map drive and appears in Microsoft Office applications as its own ribbon in the toolbar.  By embedding document management functionality directly into the applications that are used everyday, employees can seamlessly transition to using powerful document management functionality without significant investment in training and changing their regular work routines.

In these uncertain economic times, most companies are faced with the challenge of how to maximize returns on tighter margins. It’s a do-more-with-less strategy that requires business operations be optimized now to meet current economic realities.

One area to consider for improving the bottom line is to look at how information is managed in the organization. This includes all the content, things like documents, invoices, etc.; all the actions, things like reviews, and approvals; and all the processes, these are the repeatable steps that drive the flow of information. Improving how information is managed, the content, actions, and processes, will improve efficiency, reduce risk, and lead to cost savings.

There is another upside to consider with this as well… and it’s a silver lining. With any change comes opportunity, and the right kind of change now can position an organization for even greater success long term.

There are least seven ways that improvements in how information is managed can have an impact on the bottom line in terms of efficiency, risk and cost savings. These were outlined in a document control webinar we held recently, and are also highlighted in an ePaper.

Number 1: Find information, Instantly
Number 2: Automate business processes
Number 3: Improve collaboration
Number 4: Capture a record of every change.
Number 5: Reduce the risk of email.
Number 6: Maintain compliance with regulations
Number 7: Eliminate paper storage costs and go Paperless.

Check out our document control webinar and request a copy of our Silver Lining ePaper to get more details on each.

In our regulated world today, there is no avoiding the need for better document control. Anyone familiar with the bite of Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II, SEC, HIPAA, and FRCP eDiscovery can quickly attest to this. One of our customers said it best in his comment about regulatory risk, “Every piece of paper is a liability waiting to happen if it gets misfiled or lost.”

But implementing a document control system offers even more than “being compliant” with the regulation du jour.

The usefulness of placing controls on information – regulating access, logging changes, managing distribution, automating actions in business processes – has operational and productivity benefits that extend well beyond the realm of regulatory compliance.

Consider this: How much time is spent by typical knowledge workers simply looking for lost documents, trying to locate documents they know exist but were created by others, or recreating versions that can’t be found? In an office where files are saved on personal drives, shared folders, and filing cabinets, versus one where documents are maintained in easily-accessible repositories with versioning and indexed searching, the time differences can be quantified in real terms by worker productivity.

This simplest of examples barely sheds light on the extent to which information accessibility, or its inaccessibility, influences productivity.

Even greater benefits are realized through process automation. Document control can automate repetitive business process that generate a paper trail. This includes virtually any process that has a review, notification, approval, or a multitude of other actions. Document control removes the user dependence from the process to make the process flow automatically. People focus on decisions, leaving technology to drive the process forward.

Time and time again, we are approached by prospective customers who want nothing more than to escape the shackles of their existing system and find a better document management system.  They’re frustrated with their legacy system’s functionality, interface design, and the “customer-no-service”. Having experienced the drawbacks of their existing systems, they are easily attracted to one with a user-oriented design, broad range of solutions, and that is backed by the helpfulness of everyone in the organization, most notably the support department.

Unfortunately making the transition to a new document management system is not always a straightforward process.  Many document management or document imaging systems on the market today are engineered to support bulk import of documents while completely ignoring support for exporting files and supporting data.

There are a number of reasons why companies need the capability to convert from a document management system – aside from simply being dissatisfied with the application.  Several of these other examples that have impacted our customers (some converting to Document Locator, others away from) include company mergers, document turnover at the end of a project, permanent archival to other media formats, selling a business line, and more.

Having flexibility in the document management system to allow for bulk export is important. For prospects and customers with issues converting from their proprietary legacy systems, this warning comes too late.  However for anyone in the document management market researching solutions, I have some telltale warning signs to watch for that could lead to difficulties down the road:

• Storing documents with file extensions that differ from their source application
• Backend database requirements outside of the mainstream relational database products such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, and MySQL
• Stores data in a flat-file database “like” system
• Proprietary compression or encryption techniques are used
• Product does not offer an API (Application Programming Interface) or SDK (Software Developer Toolkit)
• Built-in viewer technology that displays the images using non-standard file formats
• Bulk export tools are not built into the base product

Awareness of these warning signs upfront can safeguard that your data will not be held captive in a document management system.  We have worked with some not-so-lucky customers whose only option for converting from their legacy document management system is to manually print each document (to paper or PDF) and then to re-key in the index information.  Other customers have provided us with samples of their encrypted files or their database that no one remembers the password to asking that our professional services team run decryption cracker technologies in hopes they can free their data.  Please do not let this happen to you.

Investing in document management can help your company meet the challenges of today and tomorrow as the following story illustrates.

One of ColumbiaSoft’s real estate investment customers recently expanded their use of Document Locator to meet additional compliance regulations.  The customer originally deployed document management to provide their Real Estate Development group with the tools to track and manage engineering contracts and drawings.  That implementation proved successful and laid the ground work for expanding their use of Document Locator in other areas of the company.

Shortly after rolling out Document Locator in the development group, the organization was acquired by a multinational investment firm headquartered in Japan.  As a wholly-owned subsidiary of a Japanese corporation, the company’s internal and external communications became subject to the regulatory guidelines of Japanese law.  Most notably, they were required to comply with J-SOX.  J-SOX (Japanese Sarbanes Oxley), which became law in 2006, requires internal controls over financial reporting as mandated by the Japanese Financial Instruments and Exchange Law.

After meeting with auditors and reviewing the features included with the latest version of Document Locator, the company realized that they already possessed the tools and knowledge required to fulfill J-SOX’s compliance regulations.  A  repository for Document Locator was developed that mapped J-SOX procedures to Document Locator features including workflow, security, scan processes, and document audit logs.  The model implementation was then audited by internal and external compliance officers who found that the policies and procedures implemented by Document Locator met J-SOX requirements.

The company is now in the process of deploying the solution enterprise wide.  Partnering with ColumbiaSoft has enabled this real estate investment customer to spend less time dealing with compliance issues and more time focusing on their core business – developing and managing commercial real estate.

The recent solvency and credit crisis resulting in $85B in government secured loans at AIG has affected valuations on Wall Street, brought skepticism to Main Street, and threatened to undermine the insurability of tens of thousands of AIG’s customers. For one AIG-insured Document Locator customer, however, the debacle raised immediate concerns that the fallout could leave them in violation of major environmental consulting contracts resulting from AIG’s diminishing credit rating.

To ensure they remained in compliance with their contractual obligations, the executive team ordered a comprehensive legal review of their largest contracts. The request for the contracts was fulfilled by a corporate paralegal using Document Locator. With the metadata attributes consistently applied to their documents, isolating the contract documents for their larger clients was straightforward. The paralegal retrieved and distributed the contract documents before the conversation among upper management who were requesting the documents had even concluded.

The company’s primary Document Locator user says that requests like this were significant challenges for them in the past before implementing document management. This was just another example of how their organization benefits daily from utilizing Document Locator.

So here’s a recent success story worth a mention: A manufacturing company that implemented Document Locator into their Quality department received a higher return on investment than they anticipated. The process resulted in the company receiving accreditation for selling their manufactured products into a lucrative new market.

The primary business driver for purchasing document management was to strengthen document control activities for the Quality department. To that end, the company concentrated their deployment on building controls around approval processes, folder structure standards, metadata indexing, document security, audit trails, and automatic change notifications.

Since completing their deployment of Document Locator, the company has fulfilled the necessary Nuclear Quality Assurance audits for being a supplier to construction companies building nuclear power plants. As they communicated to ColumbiaSoft, they would have never passed the audits without the capabilities and auditability of their document management system.

I recently read that product managers categorically receive the most emails in the company. Reading this brought a grin across my face – misery loves company. My email inbox gets bombarded daily with product enhancement ideas, consulting proposals, internal questions, meeting requests, and industry articles. For me, it’s an imperative that our employees have a means to organize and manage their entire volume of emails. Without these tools, we could never leverage the wealth of reference and historical data contained within the email archives.

As Product Manager at ColumbiaSoft, I speak with managers and executives from a number of industries including AEC, pharmaceutical, facilities management, legal, health and manufacturing that are inundated with emails and need solutions for managing them. It is clear that there are differing needs across an organization based on a person’s job responsibility. With employees working in a project-based environment there is tremendous value in having the capability to store and manage your emails in the same directory structure as the bulk of your project documents. For IT and corporate executives, the capability to provide fast and accurate e-Discovery, to meet regulatory compliance, and to allow employees to restore their own lost emails is exceedingly important.

Email has a number of inherent shortcomings. It is de-humanizing, riddled with unscrupulous SPAM, and seeps beyond the regular work day. Unfortunately, many of those issues are beyond my control. (My only advice is to avoid those invasive handhelds that beam email communications to you 24 hours a day. ) But, there are real world issues we can confront such as providing solutions for employees to help organize emails alongside their project documents in addition to providing IT staff tools for managing the backend email archive.

In a project-based environment, one of the most endemic problems is gaining access to emails that are siloed in a project manager’s inbox. Non-email documents associated with a project such as contracts, schedules, and specifications are typically stored on a shared file server to promote collaboration across the project team. Project-related email storage is not. A manager’s inbox will contain critical information that affects the direction of a project, yet the data is trapped on an island. Even though the information contained in these emails normally gets disseminated to the team members, when unexpected contingencies arise (and they do) the team does not receive critical information. This costs money, time, and credibility. Imagine if the project manager had automated email rules configured in MS Outlook that stored and indexed project related documents in the same directory structure as the other critical documents, thus providing the entire team access to critical information regardless of the PM’s availability.

Dealing with the volume of email in your inbox is difficult enough, but let’s not forget the struggles that your IT staff has dealing with maintaining the servers 24/7, providing for disaster recovery, and dealing with the constant requests for retrieving lost or deleted emails from backups. To lessen the load on the IT staff, I recommend migrating older emails that are bloating the MS Exchange server to an email archive solution. Leading email archive software packages offer a variety of solutions that expedite many labor intensive tasks that burden IT departments. One such task is handling e-Discovery requests. Unless you have ever been involved with an e-Discovery process, it’s difficult to imagine the complexity of aggregating all relevant data across your organization and from dispersed systems. With litigation so frequent in many industries, IT teams are too often dragged into e-Discovery without the benefit of tools that simplify gathering and distributing the data. Having an email archive tool capable of providing instant search results based on sender, recipient, body content, and attachments along with associated emails tracked through threading information can shorten e-Discovery processes significantly. Another common time drain for IT is handling requests for copies of lost or deleted emails. Imagine if all of the company’s inbound and outbound emails were stored in an email archive solution capable of providing secure access to the archive so that IT staff could enforce smaller Exchange database size limits while providing emails 24/7 access to emails they either sent or received.

Regardless of whether you view email as a blessing or curse, it’s here to stay. The question is now how best to deal with managing and archiving emails along with the myriad of other documents amassed in your organization. With the software packages being offered by several document management companies focused on integrating email management and document management into a single solution, I think they are worth investigating in more detail.

Like every good (and bad) revolution before it, the Email revolution is fading. Not that we won’t be using email anymore… just the opposite. Email has become so routine and essential to our daily lives and business that it is no longer revolutionary. It’s ordinary.

Just a decade ago, when I wanted to send a written message I typed away in my handy fax template before making the rounds past the printer and then fax machine. I don’t even know where the office fax machine is located anymore. Now, its seems everything is done via email. Even the friendly phone doesn’t ring as much (and I hope I don’t lose it too).

This shift to email hasn’t been unnoticed by the legal and regulatory folks either, those honest blokes who battle for and against us in the halls of justice and create regulations with official sounding names like Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, SEC, FINRA, FRCP (and I’m sure their are dozens more).

Which brings us to the point of all this. Email is now by-and-large considered as likely to be a corporate “record” as any other form of written word. As records managers know, a “record” is defined by content and purpose, not file type. So, it doesn’t matter if you don’t save it, if you delete it, or if you just pretend it never happened… if an email was sent to you or you sent it to someone else, it could be considered by someone as a “record”. For more on this topic, check out our page on records management.