Organizations focus on process improvement

Posted by Mark Brousseau

There is a “huge uptick” in the number of companies evaluating document management solutions – particularly when it comes to enterprise content management (ECM), KeyMark CEO Jim Wanner told attendees at the KeyMark Horizons Conference 2010 at The Hyatt Downtown in Greenville, SC.

“If you look at the data from Wells Fargo, the amount of software sales was negatively effective by the recession in the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009,” Wanner said. “Then you see a massive swing in software sales, largely driven by companies looking for improved processes.”

Today, with the economy showing signs of improvement, and companies making the first moves toward hiring more staff, buyers are looking hard at their core systems to figure out ways to improve business processes, Wanner said. One primary area of focus: reporting. “Companies don’t want to be caught off guard anymore. They want to know exactly what’s going on at each moment in time. We’ve always had departmental reporting. But companies want executive reporting via dashboards, with Sharepoint as a portal that interfaces with a lot of different systems,” Wanner told attendees.

There also is a huge push towards enterprise automation. “We have had more conversations about ECM in the last six months than at any time in our company’s history,” Wanner said. “This is a significant change. It is being driven by new hardware that makes it easier to do distributed scanning, and by software with streamlined interfaces that make it easier to push out applications.”

“People do not view ECM as a departmental solution anymore,” Wanner concluded.

Document classification, which automates document identification, also is gaining traction. “This is the wave of the future,” Wanner said. “It is good for most core applications, such as financial, insurance and government, and is delivering accuracy greater than 80 percent in many cases. When combined with mailroom equipment – document classification makes the digital mailroom a reality.”