All together now
What's your company's biggest challenge? Finding the information you needââ,¬"even though you already have it. That's where content management systems can save the day. They let you search and index your existing documents, and keep track of all their iterations. More importantly, they offer a single system for organising and managing workflow.
BOC Gases, an industrial gas seller, used to process endless reams of paper when working on construction plans for new plants. Now it uses Documentum 4i eBusiness Platform to manage the 30,000-plus drawings the company processes in a year. Documentum's system makes it easy to revise plans, arranging them in treelike groups, with earlier versions linked directly to the latest one.
"We can see if a drawing has been modified in future plans," says John Koerwer, BOC's design automation manager. And anyone at one of BOC's Documentum-equipped plants in 20 countries can review drawings instantly. By hand, it used to take about a week to assemble and reproduce a bid package consisting of hundreds of individual drawings. Now it takes just a few hours to deliver the same material electronically. The system cost BOC about $500,000 to set up; Documentum's basic systems start at around $65,000.
If you manage specialised documents like oversize maps or blueprints, Digital Paper DocQuest can help. DocQuest lets you zoom in on an area of a drawing and annotate it, just as if you had the paper copy in front of you. Grove Worldwide, a crane and aerial work platform manufacturer, uses DocQuest to shepherd some 15,000 prints per week.
As it is, it's often a headache to route and share documents within a single organisation. Bringing clients into the process makes things trickier. That's the challenge advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi faced. It needed a better way to connect international employees and clients who collaborate on its ad campaigns. That meant integrating a document management system with the agency's Brain, an intranet and extranet that links 152 offices in 92 countries.
Saatchi chose Hummingbird CyberDocs for the job. "Creative teams in the United States now work with a European office for a client in Asia," says Laura Limbach, executive vice president and CIO. "Everyone views the product in real time." Previously they used fax, email, or FedEx. With the Web-based system, days and weeks shrink to minutes.
CyberDocs costs about $500,000 to set up for 500 users, plus annual upkeep costs. But you don't have to invest huge amounts of money to make the most of an extranet. Sometimes all you need is to outsource an extranet for a single department or division.
Take the legal department, for example. Retailing giant Sears, Roebuck and Company uses CaseShare csPortal in its legal department to review 10,000 advertisements a year. One person used to spend many hours manually culling through the ads. Now Sears routes ads between departments, in-house counsel, and outside law firmsââ,¬"quickly reviewing ads and annotating them. Result: CaseShare saved the company $450,000 last year, according to its associate general counsel John J. James. CaseShare charges $1,500 a month for a hosted site.
Another affordable way to work more efficientlyââ,¬"and eliminate paperââ,¬"is a Web-based collaboration service like WebEx, which lets you share documents, transfer files, and conduct real-time meetings. The service costs $6,000 to set up, plus $100 per user per month.
The Associated General Contractors of America, a 33,000-member society, uses WebEx to host document-review meetings. Before, the process forced members to travel to meetings or participate in teleconferences. "If you have four or five people working on a contract, it's cumbersome to email or fax to make changes," says Mark Pursell, the association's executive director of business development. "There'd be five or more revisions and arguing points. With WebEx we can go through changes line by line in short order."
Pursell estimates that WebEx has saved the association more than $100,000 in travel expenses since last August, and it cost only $17,000 plus a $3,000 setup fee.
A collaboration service works when you don't need access to other company information that would reside on an intranet or extranet. But what if you have the opposite problem: the need to share information that resides on individual systems or different servers? You need a distributed content management system like NextPage NXT 3. This software essentially connects all of your information repositories in real time so it appears to everyone in the company that the data is in one place.
Law firm Baker & McKenzie uses NextPage to connect seamlessly with its clients for cross-border mergers and acquisition deals. "Clients want to be closer to a deal," says Brian Gillam, director of practice management systems.
Before, legal files sat on someone's desk, unstructured and unorganised. Now the firm can easily track who works on what files, Gillam says. And searching for information is faster and easier. Since rolling out the system last year, Gillam says, "We had a content explosion. It's more efficient to reuse [our] expertise."
The firm invested more than $85,000 in the system. The payback? Gillam says the company is now able to do more accurate billing because by gauging workflow the firm can better estimate the time its services will take.
