What if there was a simple way to reduce labor costs while boosting productivity?

Many businesses still rely on either paper records, electronic documents, or a combination of the two. Often this content is unorganized, not secure, and overall inefficient. An effective Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system, coupled with updated internal policies regarding records, makes information more accurate, complete, accessible, and useable.  Ensuring your employees and customers can get better information faster simply is a smart business decision.

Typically organizations can’t see the immediate benefit, or they choose to prioritize other initiatives, and the longer they ignore the problem, the worse the consequences may be. There are countless reasons to consider ECM, and we’ll highlight 7 of the most common.

1. Reduce Operating Costs:  Plain and simple, manual record keeping is costly. Between hard costs (equipment, office space, storage space, supplies, and equipment maintenance) and soft costs (labor, time lost, productivity lost), your organization may be wasting thousands of dollars without fully realizing it. An effective ECM system can virtually eliminate these costs.
   
2. Improve Efficiency and Productivity:  How much time are your employees wasting looking for data, searching for missing documents, and replacing missing paperwork? The answer may surprise you, the average employee spends 30-50% of their time and 15-30% of their time looking for documents that are missing or misfiled. By implementing an ECM, your employees can benefit from instant information retrieval, freeing them up to complete more productive revenue generating activities.
   
3. Ensure Regulatory Compliance:  Every organization has some standard of compliance they must maintain, whether at the internal, state, or federal level. Often these standards are ever changing, and your current record keeping system is likely not completely compliant. Implementing an ECM with security features such as access control and audit trails helps companies ensure they are in full compliance and allows them to avoid severe fines and penalties.
   
4. Protect Information from Disaster: Many organizations don’t want to think about potential disaster, after all, it can be a scary thought. But by putting processes in place that can protect crucial data in the case of fire, flood, data breach, or other catastrophic event, you can feel more at ease. Having a business continuity and a disaster recovery plan and system in place increases the likelihood that you can continue business as usual after a disaster.
   
5. Minimize Litigation Risks:  Data privacy breaches cost US business on average $200+ per record and cost $5.85 million dollars last year.  These costs increase exponentially in heavily regulated industries such as healthcare, education, pharmaceutical and financial services. Reduce liability and protect your organization with enhanced security measures from your ECM.
   
6. Preserve Corporate Memory :  Your files are your organization’s memory. It’s often overlooked, but records created today may be needed for future planning and decision making, and without easy access to this content you may make less-informed decisions. Beyond that, critical corporate knowledge can be lost when employees leave if information has been misfiled, stored personal on computer desktops, or buried in email chains. Maintaining all of your organization’s records in a central hub can preserve your organization’s memory.
7. Gain a Competitive Advantage: Organizations that are still relying on outdated content management systems are significantly behind their competitors, and have quite a ways to go to catch up. Starting with a robust ECM system is a stepping stone towards become a smarter, fully automated organization.