Everyone is being bombarded with news regarding the housing melt-down and the associated ‘credit crisis’ affecting Wall Street.  The question facing many businesses across the country is: “How will a worsening economy impact our business?”  The exact answer to that question requires a crystal ball and keen understanding of economics.  Having said that, there are things you can to focus on regardless of the future economic predictions that will affect your bottom line.

There are countless areas of your business that can be streamlined by leveraging a quality document management tool.  Too often companies fail to investigate their internal operational efficiencies until there is a driving factor that negatively impacts revenue.  Take the time to examine your document flows throughout your organization.  More than likely you will find processes that could benefit from document management which will save you time and money.

For example, imagine a solution that can reduce operating costs while increasing your capacity to provide value to your customers.  Listed below is a small sampling of solutions built upon Document Locator’s framework that provide high return on investments for customers.

1. Customer Service Representatives – Provide instant access to records allowing customer service representatives to quickly answer questions and forward documents to people requesting information.  This is done by bringing electronic documents and paper documents into an indexed, searchable document repository.  Scanning paper documents also frees up office space, improves disaster recovery options, and reduces time associated with filing and re-filing paperwork.
2. Digital Signatures for Document Approvers – Use the digital signature technology included in Adobe Acrobat as part of an electronic workflow approval process for efficient, verifiable document approval processes. This enables employees to easily and securely approve documents from their office, or remotely via web access.
3. Unified Storage for Project Team Members – Provide your project teams with a central location to access invoices, drawings, email communications, contracts, and more.  This eliminates searching for documents distributed across email servers, accounting software packages, project management software, shared file servers, and more.

In an economic downturn, financial and human resources get stretched.  Simply throwing more resources at a problem is not realistic.  Rather, this is the time to invest in productivity tools that allow your organization to accomplish more with your existing resources.

The good news is that most of the businesses I work with are ‘cautiously optimistic’ about the future.  However, their opinions might be skewed from the wider market only because these are ColumbiaSoft customers that are already invested in document management technology… so it could be said that they already have the competitive advantage of an implemented document management system allowing their employees to spend more time working on core competencies that drive revenue.  By operating a lean, efficient organization, companies can be well-positioned to thrive in times of prosperity and economic turmoil where others struggle.

Written by: Scott Zieg

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.

Written by: Scott Zieg

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.

Written by: Scott Zieg

For employees whose job dictates that they regularly create new documents, having access to an intuitive and easy to use version control system is a major advantage. Early in my career I distinctly remember the struggles I experienced creating specification documents, training guides, and other business related documentation. Authoring the content was challenging enough, but the issues were compounded by the processes associated with saving revisions, routing the documents for approvals, and distributing the final version to the intended recipients.

Version control is defined by Wikipedia as “the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of information.” While that definition is accurate, I think my brother put it best when he said “version control is akin to having unlimited edit-undo.” When creating documents using a version control system, the author has the capability of recording 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. Having access to snapshots of the document is especially helpful when the author needs to rewrite or remove a section of a document. Prior to working with a document management system, I am embarrassed to admit to the number of times I removed entire sections of a document without saving off a version of the file. Deleting sections from a document inevitably leads to rework and it did for me countless times.

The symptoms of a business needing a version control system are easy to recognize. The primary symptom is when users have file names saved with special extensions detailing the file version’s “something” (date, editor’s initials, or internal revision number). Experienced document authors compensate for not having a document management system by developing their own naming conventions for each document revision. As a result, their ‘My Documents’ folder is littered with countless revisions of documents using specialized file naming conventions such as filename – date – revision.ext. Modifying file names can partially address the individual author’s version control needs, but invariably leads to wide-scale confusion across an organization. The confusion is exacerbated when versions of files are emailed to others in the organization responsible for editing and/or approving the documents. Often the email recipients save a local copy of the file using yet another naming standard before performing their edits. When the files are returned, the original author now has a trail of dissimilar named files that require manual consolidation and cannot be easily audited.

In engineering and software departments, version control systems have been commonly used for decades. One Tree Software, in the early 1990s, developed the most prolific version control system for application engineers called ‘SourceSafe’ for Windows. One Tree Software was subsequently purchased by Microsoft and the SourceSafe application became integrated as part of Microsoft Visual Studio (Microsoft’s software development application suite) since 1995. Visual SourceSafe (VSS) became a widely adopted tool for managing versions of source code files, but never gained popularity with users outside of the engineering and software development teams.

The document management industry recognized the benefits that engineers were experiencing with version control and sought to bring equivalent functionality to the rest of the business community. Before that vision would be realized, a new breed of intuitive, integrated document management system needed to be developed that supported how document creators produced content. Business users required the essential version control features that engineers had come to expect such as saving revisions of documents, notes for detailing specific versions of the file, and the capability to promote historical versions of a file. However unlike the engineers, the business users also demanded advanced document management functionality including integration into Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat applications, electronic workflow for routing documents, electronic review and approval, digital signatures, document retention schedules, and profiling with metadata indexing.

Today business users have the opportunity to deploy a document management system that provides their users with robust version control functionality. Document creators from diverse industries gain notable efficiencies by utilizing a version control system for maintaining revisions of their documents. The benefits they realize include having access to all historical data associated with the document being generated, a complete document log detailing who and when a document was accessed, and the assurance that all of the versions of the document are stacked in the document’s version history and not concealed through varied naming standards. Can your organization afford not to provide your document authors with the tools they need to efficiently and confidently create the documents that drive your organization?

Written by: Scott Zieg

Document management systems provide users the capability to index documents using metadata attributes. These index attributes, when applied in a consistent fashion, can provide users with the capability to quickly find and retrieve associated documents. The question is… how do you enforce consistent metadata indexing for all of your documents? Relying on free-form text to index documents in an environment consisting of multiple locations and numerous users will not work.

A classic example is when a user is prompted to enter a business name. Even a household name such as Dell has numerous potential spellings, like: “Dell”, “Dell, Inc.”, “Dell Computing”, or “Dell Corporation”. In each of the representations, the good news is the name Dell is consistently included which allows for semi-efficient LIKE searches against the system. For more complex company names such as Pfizer, simply ensuring a portion of the name is entered correctly is a challenge. Finding 100% of the related documents requires ensuring the attributes used to represent the same entity are entered identically each time.

The easiest approach to ensure consistent metadata is to provide users with intelligent drop-downs that allow them to quickly select from a list of approved entries. There are interface designs that people use on a regular basis that utilize drop-down tools. For example, when purchasing online, often there is a drop-down list containing all of the abbreviations of the states/provinces in the United States and Canada. Living in Oregon, I have learned that if I press the ‘O’ key 3 times, Oregon usually gets selected and I can quickly move on to the next field. Entering metadata for documents should be a comparable experience. The key is to provide users with the ability to enter accurate data with the “least amount of strokes” – golfers should love that analogy!

So the next logical questions are “where does the list of allowable index variables come from?” and “how does it get maintained?” In the state abbreviations example, the available list is small and rarely changes making storing and maintaining the list a simple assignment. However, with most implementations the indexing requirements include much larger populations of dynamic data including customer information, document categories, and project attributes. For most of my customers, this data already exists in one or more of their computer systems such as the CRM system, the ERP system, and/or the project management system. By leveraging the existing business applications’ existing data, users performing the role of indexing documents can get intelligent, real-time dynamic drop-downs without maintaining redundant sets of data.

Ensuring that index information is consistent across the repository is only half of the equation. The remainder is to ensure that the indexing information can be applied to the document in the most efficient manner. To that end, a robust document management system provides the capability to automatically index a significant portion of the metadata information using what ColumbiaSoft refers to as “nested profile properties”. Imagine if the process of indexing documents required only entering a customer’s identification number and the remaining index attributes such as customer name, region, and account manager were automatically populated. By linking attributes using ODBC connections and applying business intelligence rules, the data can be quickly and accurately indexed allowing your entire company to efficiently manage documents.

Efficiently applying consistent index information to your documents using a document management system will improve your organization’s ability to find, leverage, and manage your critical business documents. The first thing I hear from recent document management converts is the remarkable time savings and efficiencies their organizations realized by having properly indexed their documents. For example, time-intensive activities like responding to customer inquiries are minimized to quick tasks, which frees up resources to work on core business activities.

Written by: Scott Zieg

Included in Document Locator v5.2 are several enhancements to the workflow system. One enhancement already generating enormous fanfare in the user community is the overhauled notification system. Previous generations of Document Locator dutifully rendered and distributed email messages to the appropriate users notifying them based on the required task. These notifications included relevant information such as workflow task details, file index information, and user entered comments.

What ColumbiaSoft heard from our user community was that the existing messaging solution worked. The notification messages contained the appropriate content and were reliably received by their intended recipient notifying them of subscription events, pending workflow tasks, or user initiated notifications. As with anything, however, there is always room for improvement. Many customers told us they wanted to have the capability to design custom notifications.

The result: we designed a configurable email notification template architecture in v5.2. The new HTML-based template framework allows users to merge variable data from Document Locator into pre-configured HTML-based email templates. This architecture enables customers (maybe with help from their graphic designers) to create templates based on the company’s own brand or look and feel. These templates can include embedded images, CSS styles, table formatting, confidentiality statements, and more. Because the templates are HTML-based, any standard design tool can be employed including graphics-based design tools such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver.

One of the 5.2 beta customers “test drove” the new email notification system and created a report-style email for customer distribution via a workflow process. The notification system uses tokens to dynamically merge metadata attributes into pre-configured HTML templates. The design also supports one-to-many data relationships as it loops through sections creating multiple lines. This enables the report-style email notification being tested by the customer. In their example, the email report included their corporate logo along with detailed information pertaining to all of the files being distributed through their workflow process.

Configurable email notification templates are included as part of Document Locator v5.2, so note to DL customers… get ready to brush up on your design skills and start gathering your thoughts about how configurable notifications could benefit your organization. I’m looking forward to hearing your stories about implementing the configurable notifications and how it impacted your organization.

Written by: Scott Zieg

The term ‘document management’ has been employed by marketers to describe a broad spectrum of business functions including document scanning, version control, document retrieval, document creation, electronic and paper archiving, document retention, and more. Despite the multitude of definitions, at the core of a robust document management system is an indexing system that is configured to easily capture metadata attributes that map to a customer’s business process.

When introducing document management concepts to people for the first time, I recommend beginning the discussion with an overview of how metadata attributes are used to index documents. While the idea of indexing documents is new to many workers, the concept of structuring data for search and retrieval dates back centuries. As far back as records were kept, hand written documents such as birth certificates were stored in folders and boxes based upon an agreed upon structure designed for easy document retrieval. Shelves, filing cabinets, boxes and folders were used to implement a logical sub-structure system for bulk storing documents. An early example of the records storage process was used by governments for maintaining birth certificates. The storage of birth certificates could be maintained in a filing cabinet labeled by the Hospital’s name, in a drawer marked with the year in a folder named by the month. In the birth certificate example, Hospital Name, Year and Month are metadata attributes designed to allow for efficient document retrieval.

With the evolution of affordable shared file servers, everything has changed, yet nothing has changed. Workers are now producing exponentially more documents (thankfully most are electronic), yet the process of storing and retrieving the documents is similar to existing paper-based storage techniques. Despite the advances in technology, most businesses are storing and managing documents on shared file servers using folder structures that essentially mirror the paper filing process. With the paper-based birth certificate storage example above, would the storage and retrieval process be different if all of the birth certificates were digitally scanned on to a shared file server? Probably not. There would be a folder named Hospital with sub folder of Year containing a child sub folder for each month of the year. Within the individual month folders would be the birth certificate records with a naming convention like “social security number – last name.pdf”.

Digitizing manual processes can generate great efficiencies, especially with what I refer to as “sneakernet” – people running around retrieving and moving documents by hand. When a request is received for a copy of a birth certificate on a shared file server, a clerk would easily be able locate the original records from their PC instead of physically rifling through a filing cabinet. Storage based exclusively on a folder hierarchy fails when there is a requirement to retrieve information not represented by the folder structure. Imagine, for example, an immediate need to gather all birth certificates with Dr. Smith as attending physician over the last 9 months. If the doctor’s information is not associated with the folder structure or part of the file’s name, manually opening and reading through the content of all the documents throughout the storage system is the only option for gathering the required records.

When properly implemented, document management systems allow users to store documents in a logical folder structure while also including useful metadata attributes and full-text indexing capabilities. The combination of a logical tree-based folder structure and metadata provide users the ability to quickly navigate to documents or to perform detailed searches for the information they need. The additional metadata associated with each document generally allows for a flatter (fewer sub-folders) storage hierarchy meaning easier navigation and fewer misfiling of documents because the metadata attributes are displayed on the screen along side of the files as sortable column values. In addition, metadata attributes and full-text indexing allows for searching that breaks the bounds of a folder structure eliminating costly labor intensive searches when the search criteria doesn’t match the folder structure format.

Written by: Scott Zieg

Most everyone knows what metadata is. And, we know that if we are organizing and categorizing electronic files, “metadata” can be our best-friend.

Perhaps the simplest definition of metadata goes something like this: it is all the “data about the data”. In other words, information that describes a file or its content. It can be basic things like ‘when a file was created’, or ‘who created the file,’ etc. But metadata can (and should) extend much deeper to be fully useful in the management of information.

Let’s say, for example, you are a project manager and your projects involve thousands of critical documents, emails, and faxes. You might need to organize this information for several reasons; you might want to be able to quickly retrieve it later, or you might want to easily hand it off or archive it at project completion. How you choose to describe your files - how you apply metadata - will impact your success in finding and organizing information later on. A project manager might, for instance, want to have metadata that describes the project name, the project ID number, the project team member name, the project client name, and so on.

With metadata, there is one most basic consideration to keep in mind. Determine at the outset what metadata you need to capture. The main factors to consider are all the ways you might want to organize, search, and categorize information now and into the future. For instance, if you think there is any chance you might want to sort or find files based on the ‘project account rep’s name’, start capturing that data from the start.

Written by: Jim Kemp

We’ve all seen it at one point or another. The “paper chase” is that routine paper-driven process that happens over and over again, but for some reason is still operating in an ancient pre-digital area.

Accounting offers a good example, where some companies are ahead of the curve, and others are still passing paper. Here’s a pretty generic scenario that applies to just about any type of company: invoices come in and they are routed for approval; sometimes they need to seen by higher-ups for uber-approval based on dollar amount or budget; they get sent back to accounting for processing; the data gets entered and… if everything is successful, the bill is paid on time.

In a paper world, this process is slow, invoices get misplaced, data is manually entered, people forget to approve, and you get the picture. Yet for many companies, a paper-based process is still the norm.

In the digital era, paper-based processes such as invoice approval can be easily automated. Updating the invoice approval scenario would look something like this: invoices come in and they are digitized, capturing data that is automatically incorporated into accounting systems; notifications with electronic copies of the invoices go out to approvers; some simple workflow steps take care of the odd circumstances where higher-ups need to review; accounting receives notification of approval and all is well.

The big benefit is time, and time is money. Time is saved by eliminating the need to ship, fax or send paper; more time is saved by capturing data electronically; even more time is saved by putting the process in a closed-loop system where invoices can not get lost, misplaced, or forgotten; and still even more time is saved by getting it right the first time and eliminating the need to correct mistakes later.

Written by: Jim Kemp

We heard from Ed Fry (Chevron) this morning. He talked about the challenges of managing the development and operation of large, long-lived capital projects. Here are some interesting numbers to think about:

• Chevron currently has 5-10 petabytes of information stored for their existing capital projects. Because of the high current rate of capital development and development process changes (like BIM) resulting in more data being generated, Chevron will double that amount of information in the next two years.
• Each project averages over 100k documents accumulated from activities across the globe. During project development, Chevron is under contractual obligation to respond to external inquiries within 10 days.
• Ed emphasized that regulations and efficient business practices demand consistency in specifications, business processes, and document workflow across all projects to preserve a record of who made what decision, why, and when. It reminded me of some of the implementation work we are doing with larger ColumbiaSoft customers like Burns & McDonnell, who seem to have the same vision.

Here’s an interesting idea that also came up: At the moment an owner decides that a new facility is needed, AEC actually becomes an impediment to the owner’s business. In other words, the faster the owner can get the facility, the better. So the question that AEC firms should be considering is, what is the value to the owner of reducing that impediment, and how can they share in that value? Ed gave the example of the contractor that repaired highway structures damaged in the 2007 California tanker fire. Caltrans estimated cost of repairs at “less than $20M,” but they got a bid of about $900k from C.C. Myers. That bid got the job and C.C. Myers made an extra $5M in early completion bonuses by working around the clock and finishing in less than half of the originally estimated time. In other words, they figured out the value and how to share in it.

Written by: Carl Azar