The BITKOM industry association had predicted more than six percent growth for ECM in 2017. In particular, this should be reflected in the field of mobile devices, the application of which is particularly important in the business world.
Sales needs data
And in fact, the need for "good" content and its administration in companies is unbroken. If you can not provide your customers and partners with the right information in a timely manner, thus providing faulty or incomplete offers, service providers are no longer the first choice Code>
Offered by text building
This makes it all the more important to be able to store, view and reuse all company data in a structured manner - whether on the road, in the home office or in the classic office.
ECM from the cloud?
Especially sales and marketing are not able to act without access to customer and product data. After all, it is important to include exactly the customers or products that customers are interested in, and to form cover letters and contracts in such a way that they are not only purely legal, but also include the products or services that the potential new customer needs >
It is therefore obvious that the use of a classical ECM solution is hardly sufficient, because a connection to data and process-leading systems such as ERP, CRM or the merchandise management system is virtually unavoidable. In this way, not only all personal information such as name, gender, age and address, but also case-related information such as product details or complex product hierarchies, costs and much more can be filed in a structured form and ultimately integrated into documents such as the mentioned offers .
Technically, companies are faced with a real challenge: the system landscape and the flow of information can only be linked via a complex integration - if there is no interface that takes over this task without additional programming effort.
An integral part of Enterprise Content Management is document management, which in many cases can not be used effectively, because automation of certain processes is not possible. This can be addressed, for example, by means of standardized text modules, different rules, complex tables, and information that is integrated into template-based documents.
This kind of document generation with text modules and query aliases is not only a very fast solution for editing and creating offers or other documents, it also offers the possibility to access only current templates and text modules. This, in turn, minimizes the error rate by using incorrect or obsolete data stocks, as well as by eliminating the manual insertion of information.
For this to happen, however, inserted or modified data must always be able to be fed back into the data-carrying system in order to be always up to date with the respective customer and project status. Here, too, the interfaces already mentioned are of great importance.
Also relevant is the definition of rights and groups for the users. This allocation ensures that different user levels can only access the documents relevant to them and, for example, no inadvertent data erasure or changes can be made to text-related text modules.
The question, which is becoming more and more frequent, is: How can all information and documents be handled on the road or directly at the customer? If the Virtual Private Networks (VPN) or the local synchronization of the relevant documents were the medium of choice for a long time, the cloud has paved the way today.
The advantages are obvious: not only is it possible to access the respective solution in a location- and usually also in a terminal-independent manner, at the same time, all information and documents are available at all times, and the company's resources are also protected by outsourcing the data.
Security concerns can be at least defused by arguments such as a American data center center, the redundancy, the audit-proof archiving or even by the establishment of a separate, exclusively company-internal cloud if not out of the way Code>
Always and everywhere
Slowly and steadily, however, vendors are also pushing into the market and are taking advantage of the opportunities that the cloud entails. Where previously the relevant data from the leading systems were manually combined from a fixed location, documents were generated in a single mode with a lot of rework On different channels, such as by fax, mail or e-mail, deploy new solutions and try to provide a tool for all of the tasks associated with the ECM and reduce the complexity in this way
Companies and their employees should be able to access the platform from smartphones, tablets or laptops simply by browser or app and start directly with the offer creation. In this way, all processes and files associated with the offer management can be created and then stored and stored in a data-carrying system, on a classic file system or archive system, as well as printed.
On-Premise or Cloud: Data management has the highest relevance
The classic on-premise solutions in the enterprise content management area still prevail. In addition to the concerns about data security, the lack of confidence that the vast majority of unstructured data can be organized in the cloud, and the often complex conversion of corporate infrastructures, this can also be attributed to the rather sparse availability of software as a Service alternatives.
Regardless of which variant a company chooses for itself - one must always be considered: Without ECM integration, the connection to the corresponding systems and the constant care of all documents, an ECM system has little meaning. Only when all authorized employees are able to fill the system with up-to-date information and data can it be used profitably and integrated into offers.
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