Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

The existing potential for ECM solutions is still enormous, despite the boom that complex IT applications such as ERP, CRM and BI systems have experienced in recent years.

A host of analyses and studies has shown that despite the massive investments that have been made in complex commercial software applications in the last 20 years, the average company employee will use these high-quality applications during only a fraction of his daily office time. All classic IT applications that manage or process structured content (data) thereby achieve, on average, a joint share of office work of about 20 to 35 percent.

In fact, the bulk of office work in industry and trade is still dominated by paper filing, mail and electronic-file sharing. Fitting into this rather sobering picturefor computer and software vendors is the fact that the search for relevant and timely information to complete a task consumes on average about half the time available for office work.

Moreover, projects involving the implementation of complex IT systems, e.g. SAP S/4HANA, often focus on the global standardization of business processes, putting on hold more sophisticated,IT-based process-optimization activities. The purpose has been to limit the project’s scope, given the already considerable use of resources and the high risk involved.

Therefore, ECM (Enterprise Content Management) solutions still offer great potential, especially if they are tightly integrated with business systems and their data objects. At B&IT, we are convinced that the target-oriented combination of structured content (such as SAP S/4HANA) with unstructured content (such as documents, e-mails, drawings, scans, etc.) is an effective way to encourage the optimization and automation of business processes, especially administrative processes.

This conclusion also was confirmed through the many years of experience that our ECM consultants have beenable to collect while working oncomplex international ECM projects in both medium-sized enterprises and large corporations.
Thus ECM solutions, especially those closely tied to SAP ERP or S/4HANA, bring the following measurable benefits:

• More efficient administrative processes throughelectronic document filing, especially across sites and within corporations
• The codification of governance topics via workflow control, making processes more transparent
• Increased information availability through reduced search times
• Document archiving that complies with legal and regulatory standards

Our experiences also have been incorporated into the development of the B&IT solutions and add-ons, which are based, e.g., on SAP Workflow and IXOS / OpenText and which contribute to the automation of various processes, including:

• Invoice verification and processing
• Paperless intercompany business
• Creation and management of certificates issued by the company and of third-party certificates, e.g., in mill / metals production and in downstream operations
• Creation of customer order files

In addition to the B&IT solutions for workflow and document archiving, our experts have an excellent track record in data archiving and in document capturing, thus allowing B&IT to act as a full solution provider for ECM subjects.

B&IT Solution Approach:

• Consultingregarding the use areas and potential savings of ECM solutions
• Process analysis – analysis of business and information objects
• Design and implementation of ECMsolutions
• Planning of group-wide system and application landscapes
• Support for technology decisions regarding server hardware and storage technologies
• Planning and implementation of centralized and distributed capturing solutions (barcode, OCR, web capture)
• Ongoing project management of archive implementations

B&IT Consulting Services:

• Planning of group-wide ECM system landscapes and applications
• Design of group-wide document archives
• Implementation of group-wide document archives
• ECM project management
• Planning and implementation of (de-)centralized capturing solutions