Automate Manual Processes with Transactional Content Management

February 22nd, 2007 |
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Learn about solutions and strategies to effectively manage your paper management challenges. You will discover how to apply transactional content management to your manual, paper-based business processes, resulting in increased responsiveness, reduced cycle times, lower costs and better compliance with records and retention management.

Transcript:

Host: Bryan House – EMC Software

Guest: Naomi Miller – EMC Software

Bryan House – EMC Software

Hello and welcome to the EMC Podcast, When Content Matters. My name is Bryan House. Today’s discussion is on transactional content management and we’ll cover our solutions and strategies that you consider to address your paper management challenges. I am joined today by my colleague, Naomi Miller. Hey! Naomi.

Naomi Miller – EMC Software

Hello.

Bryan House – EMC Software

So, Naomi we can start as you take a minute to introduce yourself to our audience.

Naomi Miller – EMC Software

Sure. My name is Naomi Miller as Bryan mentioned. I am the Director of Product Marketing for our Transactional Content Management focus. I have been at EMC Documentum for just about six years now. Actually I have a background as a customer, where I worked at Hewlett-Packard and helped, manage and implement some of our content management strategies using Documentum. So, I have some good hands-on experience, as well as a lot of experience of Documentum.

Bryan House – EMC Software

Well, great. So, to start the discussion today, can you provide us maybe with an overview of transactional content management?

Naomi Miller – EMC Software

Sure. It’s a bit of a new terminology for those of you who followed the content management space. You could think of Transactional Content Management as kind of focused on your back office processes, those processes, which are transactional in nature and result in some sort of transaction happening in your company. These processes are often very paper heavy and are very traditionally, very manual in terms of their processes, cumbersome processes and time consuming processes. The Transactional Content Management approach that EMC Documentum takes, helps to streamline that whole process, helps to eliminate as much of the paper as possible to digitize that content, and to make that content available at the right time, in the right place, as part of that transactional process.

Bryan House – EMC Software

Great. So, you talk on a couple of the challenges there, maybe we should dig in a little bit more, we talk about manual processes and paper. Can we — you maybe go a little bit deeper on what some of the challenges companies face in dealing with paper in their organizations?

Naomi Miller – EMC Software

Sure. Most people could probably resonate with this in terms of those processes being quite cumbersome, very inefficient and obviously they not lead to a more and more expense. The one of the challenges is that, it isn’t just paper, although that is a large part of the process, there are also electronic documents you need to deal with, sometime EDI or XML files, and the papers. So, you need a much more holistic way of how you managing that information.

Accessing the information is probably one of the biggest business challenges. So, if you are a person, as part of that process, for instance one of the processes we look at is invoice processing, very manual, cumbersome process, where accessing the right information to — and properly execute that process can be quite difficult. It causes the requirement for very a leaner process, right only one person can be working on the file at any one time that obviously elongate that process unnecessarily.

As you can imagine this can also be quite a compliance nightmare not everybody knows where the right paperwork is. You don’t always know for sure that you are looking at the right version of the supporting documentation. Perhaps one of the biggest business challenges customers face, is the ability to really respond quickly to a customer inquiry. Every company, whether you are in financial services, or in manufacturing you are looking to always improve your customer service. And when a customer calls and/or a partner, or even a supplier calls to inquire about the state of their transaction with you, to the degree and you can’t answer pretty efficiently and pretty rapidly, you are then at a disadvantage over your competition.

Bryan House – EMC Software

Great. So, you started such a little bit on applications or business processes where this can be applied. Can you talk a little bit more about areas within businesses that are more visible or tangible in the Transactional Content Management market?

Naomi Miller – EMC Software

Sure. At a horizontal level most companies could probably recognize as I mentioned I kind of talked about these as back office processes. Your accounts payable and even your accounts receivable processes are usually very cumbersome and manual today. You could look at your legal and HR processes as well at a horizontal level. And then if you were to look into individual vertical areas, financial services probably has some of the biggest challenges in the space, you think about it essentially what financial services companies create is paper, is information, and so their processes often can be quite paper heavy, quite manual. Any individual who purchased a home could resonate with the very paper based, somewhat complex back and forth process of taking out a loan.

So, Mortgage origination, loan origination is just a prime example of where we can make that a lot of efficient. Insurance companies, we all have filed claims. Medical claims, auto-insurance claims, and so forth, the claim processing is another great target for this. Processing applications, we have examples and in government, and in education where the whole approving of an application, or the enrollment of a new student, or a new citizen in a program is also another good example.

Bryan House – EMC Software

Great, great. Certainly, I think we all experienced refinancing our mortgages so we all understand the paper involved in that on the end user side. So, we talked a lot about applications and some of the challenges, can you talk little about how companies can put solutions in place and what that means on the nuts and bolts side?

Naomi Miller – EMC Software

Sure. It’s important to note it may already be obvious to you that in a Transactional Content Management environment it isn’t just about the documents and the papers, it’s also about the transaction. So, one — I think really important element is the right understanding of what your transactional system is? What its requirements are? Who accesses that information? And what additional information do they need? So, there are certainly line of business, ERP, back office applications that need to be taken into consideration. There needs to be the right level of integration, so that to the degree we are managing, supporting documents as part of the transaction, when we have the right level of integration and seamlessness between those systems.

Certainly, scanning and imaging and digitizing content is not necessarily new, but typically what would happen is that would often get done at the back end of a process. So, you go through the full refinance process for instance, in a very paper rich process and then at the end when that loan is funded, organizations certainly would scan and digitize that content for archiving sake. Now, what we see is much more of a trend of moving that digitization and automation process upfront, so that you can truly see an ROI, you can really shorten the total amount of time that process takes to complete, as well as, in archive and retaining that information.

Bryan House – EMC Software

Excellent. So, can you talk about the — you just started to touch on the benefits company start to see from thinking holistically about Transactional Content Management? Can you go a little bit further into what those expected benefits might be?

Naomi Miller – EMC Software

Sure. The nice thing about this area is that very often organizations can see a very tangible return on their investment. Certainly there are costs, tangible costs associated with handling paper, filing papers, storing paper, copying paper, forwarding paper and you can often add those up and there are a good deal of those costs and you can’t actually eliminate. We have got examples for instance, financial services companies with distributed locations, who can simple eliminate their FedEx cost. Often times in branch locations, you would collect the day’s paper work, put it into big red envelopes and ship it across the country or wherever you need to ship it and so definitely a cost associated with that.

The other true benefit, tangible, but maybe not as — well it is ROI associated, but can’t necessarily add up that exact cost, and that is the compliance aspect. So, you collect all the paper work, you put it into envelop, you ship it across the country, who knows what is going to happen to it, that’s a compliance risk.

So, being able to automate that information, digitize that information, retain it really starts lower your compliance rest and as we mentioned perhaps again not as added up in terms of dollar and cents, but clearly giving you competitive advantage in terms of customer responsiveness is really a very big benefit. Being able to shorten the amount of time, it takes you to make any one decision. The amount of time, you can say, in responding to your customer inquires can be priceless in terms of your competitive position on the marketplace.

Bryan House – EMC Software

Great. I know one of the customer case studies that really resonates with me, I think about the spaces Cincinnati Insurance and one of the things that I really like about that story is that, is all of the things that you describing here are really behind the scenes and integrated into their SAP Claims Management System. So for the end users, utilizing this as part of their SAP environment, can you talk a little more about that case study?

Naomi Miller – EMC Software

Sure. It’s a really terrific one, people can find that on our website for more detail, but essentially we put a solution in place for Cincinnati Insurances. Our claim adjustors out in this field investigating large personal and casualty insurance claim. And that’s an environment, which is very content rich, adjustors have to go out and inspect damage. They take notes, they take picture, and they have supporting documentation. In the old days they would fill out by hand long forms. They would collect their notes. They would process their pictures. They would put them into FedEx packages, and to read it four weeks later, they would get a claim put into the system.

Today that’s all done very electronically. So, they have personal scanners where they are able to digitize their content via the Web. They are able to fill out their forms online, and a claim can essentially be put into the system in a matter of days, maybe even some times hours as opposed to weeks. So, not only do they have that immediate information now available to themselves, to the home office, and to the customer, they have also eliminated a lot of those shipping charges, and a lot of the paper cost.

So, it’s really been a traffic solution and then when the information comes in electronically, as you mentioned it’s automatically connected to their SAP Claims Processing Systems and once the claim is paid out that information is all archived on EMC storage devices as well. In a Archiving environment it’s got a much lower cost than high end storage. So, they really there got a very end-to-end, all the way from capture through the business process phase and through the archiving phase.

Bryan House – EMC Software

Yeah. It’s a great story you really get to see too when you think about a transactional process how many different types of content make up a claim in this case, or any sort of business process?

Naomi Miller – EMC Software

Exactly. As I mentioned it’s not just paper, it’s really about I am including paper in with your electronic content, digital photos and everything else, so that you have everything you need to complete that transaction as quickly as possible, with the most accuracy as possible, and at the least amount of cost.

Bryan House – EMC Software

Yeah, that’s great. Well, Naomi, I want to thank you for joining us today. This is a great discussion.

Naomi Miller – EMC Software

You are welcome. Thanks Bryan.

Bryan House – EMC Software

You are welcome and I also want to thank all our listeners for tuning into the, When Content Matters podcast series from EMC. I encourage you all to learn more about Transactional Content Management Solutions, as well as our other content management products at software.emc.com, where you can also download additional podcasts and subscribe to a number of EMC RSS podcast feed. So, I want to thank you everyone for joining us today and call better up.

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