Document management needs a wider view

According to Tim Taylor of McLaren, many companies fail to link document management systems with business processes, making tracking, retrieval and association of content unnecessarily complicated.

In our experience, different departments within an organisation have differing views over exactly what document management is and this means that the company as a whole is not in a position to realise the full benefits that an enterprise DM system can offer.

In many ways, this is a point not too far removed from the statistic highlighted in recent press reports that 80% of the population only use 20% of their mobile phones functionality.

In a commercial sense, underuse of a DM facility can reduce competitive advantage and these varying definitions need to be linked as a whole.

Although an engineer may view DM as the management of drawings in a CAD environment, the work that they do has a direct impact on key business processes such as contract negotiation, payment collection and project management.

In an engineering organisation deliverable drawings usually relate directly to payment milestones.

Project managers need to know the status of these deliverables at all times so that they can identify bottlenecks and the need to allocate resources.

This is by no means a straightforward task and managers know how painful it can be to get this information on demand, yet it is a request that will be made time and time again.

For example, a contract manager might need to make a claim for extra work and as such would ask the project engineers to pull together all relevant documentation and correspondence for a particular project.

The claim could centre on proving that requested changes were made following the review of initial design work.

Such instances are commonplace, but can be time consuming and costly in terms of lost productivity.

The more effective integration of content and document management with other business processes leads to reduced costs, improved productivity and could ultimately have a positive impact on project completion times.

The ability to meet and exceed expectations on the achievement of project milestones and deadlines is becoming a major selling proposition for engineering projects across the board.

All this information is usually available but it can be very difficult to obtain quickly and efficiently.

This should all be available to the project manager or the contracts manager at the push of a button.

"Tunnel vision" - or failure to look at the wider picture - is all too common in many businesses and as a result they lose the ability to control and link the business processes that deliver content to other systems.

All of the information that a business needs is held in its underlying IT infrastructure, which is made up of DM, HR, ERP and CRM systems etc, but often this is not linked across each repository and business agility is being impacted as a result.

For example, the engineering department may deliver a CAD drawing to the customer without the finance department being alerted.

Therefore, the invoicing process would not be triggered and, despite the fact that a contractually agreed milestone had been met, payment would be unnecessarily delayed.

Likewise, it is equally possible that the finance department could be chasing for payment based on a predicted schedule of stage completion before the work has actually been finalised.

During the economic boom of the 1990s many departments were left to their own devices when it came to choosing an IT solution, but in the current climate it is time for businesses to pull the disparate components together and manage them effectively.

The true value of content can only be realised in the context of a business process.

The issue here is not the current state of DM applications but how content can be more effectively managed in the future.

A company that has the ability to organise content across the organisation, instead of limiting it to a departmental level has a major advantage, building stronger business processes through a shared infrastructure.

The importance of managing intellectual property effectively cannot be underestimated.

In a typical project, intellectual property can manifest itself as any of the following: business rules and processes; specifications; designs; proposals and tenders.

By linking the DM systems with the wider business processes, organisations are able to free up the movement of intellectual property across departments.

With the greater control afforded through the adoption of this approach, businesses are able to harness and maximise intellectual property throughout the organisation.

This is of particular benefit to those organisations operating in regulated markets as an integrated approach aids the maintenance and proof of compliance with industry demands.

Processes, audit trails, environmental considerations, safety and quality control can all be demonstrated with greater ease and speed.

To expand on the earlier example of the engineer, lets consider the way in which project payments are administered.

As with many large projects, the contract between the engineer and the client will stipulate that payments will be made at the completion of specified stages in the project.

Some of these stages will be preconstruction, so it is vital that project managers can illustrate that their work has been completed in order that payments are made and the project is kept on schedule.

A DM solution that helps organisations to control the flow of information internally and between itself, third parties and clients, can add real value in line with business processes.

By the same token, businesses that are not adopting this approach are putting themselves at risk by exercising inadequate control over transmittals, correspondence and contracts.

In regulated industries, this can lead to the appearance of gaps in procedures and potentially to the suspension of activities.

Part of risk management is identifying the potential weakness within an organisation and removing the threat.

Organisations should view any time that they are not able to exercise control over projects or business processes as downtime and seek to minimise or eradicate such occurrences.

The DM market is evolving and now out-of-the-box functionality can be found in vertical applications to enable organisations to marry content with business processes.

The move towards collaborative working has already highlighted how the sharing of information can provide real business benefits and the astute organisation should be thinking of taking this one stage further by integrating its internal systems.

By failing to act on this now businesses are encouraging departmental tunnel vision and it is their bottom line that will suffer as a result.

This article is based on one that originally appeared in Industrial Technology.

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