In today’s fast-paced business landscape, efficient information management is paramount. ECM systems play a pivotal role in streamlining document storage, retrieval, and collaboration. This survey aimed to uncover insights from professionals across various industries, shedding light on the current business operational trends. This report looks at those results and contributes to an understanding of how ECM systems can impact enterprise operations and the evolving needs of organizations.
Laserfiche contracted SME and Mercury Research LLC to conduct an independent 3rd party study focusing on the manufacturing industry, specifically surveying over 300 professionals employed with organizations with 101 or more employees and $10M or more in annual revenue. The sample selection was taken from an independent online panel between July 12 – August 3, 2023.
Key takeaways
Although only 15% of respondents currently utilize an ECM, another 17% indicate that an ECM is on their roadmap for future process integration.
Three-in-five respondents (60%) indicated that the primary organizational need driving their interest in process integration is for increased operational efficiency.
Increasing overall process effectiveness and enabling data-driven decision making are the top priorities for organizations’ process integration/ digitization journeys. Increased data accuracy is a top business challenge their organizations are looking to resolve.
Two-thirds of respondents indicated that cybersecurity is a top priority and key concern over the next 1-3 years.
AI, cloud computing, document/records management and cloud integrations are the most common processes organizations are planning to implement or are currently being implemented.
Current system utilization
Almost all respondents (97%) indicated that their organization is using at least one automation system, with the average being between 4-5 systems Less than one-in-five respondents is currently utilizing an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems can streamline operations between the increasing number of systems manufacturers use by creating a single source of truth for production, from the production floor to the back-office.
Number of Systems Utilized by Industry
With only 20-30% of organizations’ current processes automated, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems can improve administrative work and workflows through the digitization of various paper documents and integrating them within core applications used throughout the organization.
Percentage of Operations Completely Automated
With most of factory floor operations still being completed manual, repetitive document processing is a significant waste of time (and thus unnecessary money is being spent). This creates silos and unstandardized records structures for organizations.
The cloud has proven to be a transformational innovation. Without proper management, however, it can also become a burden. When organizations first move to the cloud, this can become a major issue very early on. Employees use cloud storage until it fills up. Then, much like IT departments used to buy a new hard drive every time an old one fills, they simply add more capacity to cloud deployment. But the cloud’s pay-as-you-go model means new capacity turns into a pile of dollar signs in a hurry.
Beyond the cost, inefficient cloud use can also result in more complexity, less accessible information and tools, and reduced security. Many companies face these pitfalls as they begin cloud transformations. However, optimizing the cloud to turn these risks into benefits is possible. Business leaders seeking efficient cloud deployments may implement four strategic considerations.
1. Don’t bite off more than you can chew
Though the mantra of the day seems to be, “the cloud solves everything,” it’s not really an end all be all solution. Before signing a cloud contract, leaders should ask themselves, “Do we really need to move to the cloud?”
If an organization has recently invested in new on-premises servers that are running smoothly, and storage and networks that have been set up effectively on current infrastructure, it may not make sense to transition to the cloud right away. On the other hand, organizations that have aging hardware infrastructure, anticipate software system or server upgrades, or need additional storage may want to consider new or additional cloud capacity.
If you’ve determined that now is the right time for your organization to move to the cloud, start small. Create internal pilot programs for cloud migration; conduct feedback sessions throughout the life of the pilot. This way, any snags or mistakes (and there are always bound to be a few) won’t have a major impact, and you can effectively apply any learnings to the next system or process you migrate to cloud.
2. Take an outcomes-based approach
Finding the right cloud application to meet an organization’s needs and budget is key to extracting the best return from cloud investments. Start by clearly defining why you are migrating to cloud, and only then start evaluating the systems you’ll use to get there.
Organizations that do not conduct proper due diligence on the best options for their needs may end up with a solution that doesn’t help them achieve their business goals. That solution will only add to the final cloud bill and bog down the company in unnecessary costs, which can quickly spiral out of control.
Decision makers may want to approach this research with an outcomes-based orientation. Grounding research in the desired business outcomes can help translate technical implementation, such as cloud computing or bandwidth, to specific goals. To help reduce the cost burden, leadership can research cloud applications that provide specific solutions, such as digital file management, rather than bare-bones infrastructure, like AWS.
Don’t spend time migrating systems that will become obsolete in the next few years. If you spend precious time and money migrating systems to cloud that you’re just going to sunset, that will cut into the ultimate success of your program.
Additionally, before you start your migration, answer the question: We’re moving to the cloud, and then what? What is that step 2 after moving to the cloud? Even a successful migration can fall short when the outcomes aren’t defined prior to implementation.
3. Make sure you understand your compliances and your contracts
Cloud service providers and clients sign service-level agreements (SLAs) that establish operating thresholds, performance metrics, and other details about the cloud infrastructure or solution in question. It’s easy to gloss over these contracts and accept them as the cost of doing business.
However, organizations should examine SLAs closely so that they are never surprised when downtime or other operating concerns arise. Not every cloud service provider can or will offer five nines. Clients that understand ahead of time when and if their chosen solution may not be available to them are more likely to optimize their cloud deployments.
4. Give your team tools for success
Before buying cloud solutions, organizations must make sense of their workforce’s ability to operate in the new environment. Not every company has existing in-house staff resources to support a new system or architecture. And, a team with the know-how to handle the on-premises tools may not necessarily understand how to use cloud-based solutions.
To mitigate any incongruencies between new cloud architecture or solutions and the skillset of their employees, organizations can take a two-pronged approach. First, they can ensure that the solutions they decide to purchase seamlessly integrate legacy systems and software applications that the company may keep. Tight integration ensures teams can continue leveraging their ERP- or CRM-operating skills.
Leaders can also focus on (re)training their employees to use new cloud tools. Retraining can include workshops and hands-on demos that teach actual technical skills. Savvy leaders can also look at how new cloud operating environments may change the cultural makeup of their organization. Aligning siloed teams and workflows and enabling social relationships between coworkers can make the newly transformed digital workplace more accessible and comfortable.
The long story short is that, if leaders want their staff to support the transition, they need to support the staff.
5. Monitor and adjust accordingly
If the cloud is left as an unchecked resource, companies will experience cost overruns no matter how well they align investments to their goals. Organizations should recognize a metric that affords a degree of comfort, such as number of invoices. By finding that predictable metric to measure cloud cost, companies can better forecast spending. Partners and cloud apps with built-in monitoring tools can help keep a close eye on relevant usage metrics.
Tightening oversight also enhances visibility. Strong oversight can help decision makers understand their business on a different and more granular level, allowing them to adjust more quickly and easily when necessary.
Oversight and consideration pave the way to cloud ROI
At the end of the day, cloud optimization is about picking out the right resources to execute the right application for the right use case, not just replacing one system with another. As a result, rather than zoom in on ROI as a percentage on the balance sheet, organizations can instead focus on outcomes. If decision makers align cloud purchases to desired business outcomes, the return on their investment will follow. Companies moving to the cloud are hoping to propel their organization to the next level, but getting there is only possible through careful consideration and thoughtful oversight.
About the author
Karl Chan is CEO of Laserfiche, the leading SaaS provider of intelligent content management and business process automation, and has been with the company for almost 30 years. As a leader in Laserfiche’s development department, he played a key role in the development of Laserfiche Business Process Automation and Forms, as well as the company’s focus on Laserfiche Cloud. He has a master’s degree in computer science and bachelor’s degree in engineering. In 2015, Chan received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Business Journal.
In an era of evolving technology and limited staffing resources, the question of automating or optimizing workflows to reduce repetitive work within medical practices is a matter of “how” and when.”
Healthcare leaders feeling the pressures of a competitive labor market and stagnant reimbursement rates report they are not prepared to make a switch to a new EHR or practice management (PM) system in the coming years, but they do find value in the elimination of manual work when they invest in new platforms to save operational costs.
Laserfiche, the leading SaaS provider of enterprise content management and business process automation, partnered with Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), in 2023 to better understand the opportunities and challenges for medical practice leaders in evaluating their platforms for workflow, electronic forms, document and records management and more.
In May 2023, Laserfiche and MGMA surveyed medical practice administrators, physicians, billing and coding leaders and health information technology (HIT) workers for their views on EHR and PM systems, business automation and more to understand:
What is their current level of satisfaction with these systems?
What improvements are these healthcare leaders looking for in new platforms?
What are their priorities when looking to invest in new platforms or integrations?
Three big Ws: who, what and where
To understand the survey respondents’ overall satisfaction and willingness to embrace new platforms or integrations, we must start by assessing their current systems:
More than three-quarters (77%) of respondents reported that Epic is their primary EHR platform, with another 15% on Cerner or Athenahealth, about 8% on CPRS, eCW or Allscripts, and another 4% who responded “other.”
More than eight in 10 (82%) respondents come from large organizations of more than 100 full-time-equivalent physicians.
Hospitals or university hospitals made up the largest share of respondents by organization type (43%), followed by integrated health/delivery systems (24%) and medical group practices (23%), with the remaining 11% comprised of other academic medical settings, federally qualified health centers (FQHCs), rural health clinics (RHCs) or “other.”
Rating current platform performance: a mixed bag
Almost four-fifths (79%) of surveyed healthcare professionals gave their current EHR system a “very good” or “good” rating on overall performance, though no single attribute of their EHR system rated as highly as that broad assessment:
Data interoperability (64%) and value-based arrangement support (57%) were the top two specific ratings for “very good”/“good” performance behind the overall performance rating.
When rated for ability to eliminate manual work, the “very good”/“good” rating falls by more than 20 percentage points to 56%.
“Very good”/“good” ratings were even lower for attributes such as “saving time” (50%), saving money (47%), and mitigating clinician/worker burnout (40%).
As businesses have become more digital, many specialized applications have been developed for all different kinds of services, whether it be for recruiting new employees, providing security for data stores or analyzing data on sales leads.
While the never-ending variety of applications available to businesses can be a boon, this creates the perfect setting for collecting numerous applications or solutions, also known as Vendor Sprawl.
What is vendor sprawl and what is the cause?
In the simplest of terms, vendor sprawl means “my business has too many applications.” Looked at in a more measured way, vendor sprawl is inefficiency, whether financial or technical, that results from having application redundancies (i.e. having more than one application for the same functionality in different departments) or applications that don’t integrate well together (i.e. where information has to be manually retrieved from one system and manually entered into another).
Vendor sprawl has many causes, including:
Siloed departments and agencies
Groups that work together, but have too little knowledge of each other’s processes, can end up using different applications for the same information, making exchanging and maintaining information more difficult.
Piecemeal solutions
Some departments, such as human resources and accounting, may require specialized functionality for their day-to-day business activities. If an organization chooses to use a vast tapestry of specialized applications, instead of a small number of more versatile ones, it may find itself with a vendor sprawl problem where applications are not communicating effectively with one another.
Long-standing legacy systems
Although legacy systems may be familiar to employees, they may become outdated as technology and customer expectations evolve. Organizations that choose to add on additional applications to address these challenges, instead of replacing the legacy application, may find themselves with more applications than they need.
Lack of system updates
Although most cloud and SaaS products provide automatic updates, some desktop applications do not. An organization may end up shopping for additional applications with functionality that a simple update of an existing application would have provided.
What is content sprawl?
Content sprawl is similar to, and much of the time can be attributed to, vendor sprawl. However, instead of an organization having more applications than it needs, it has more data stores than it needs. Of course, managing redundant data storage applications can contribute to both content and vendor sprawl.
What happens when vendor sprawl isn’t addressed?
If you feel your organization may be experiencing vendor sprawl, it is better to address it earlier rather than later. This is because vendor sprawl can create a variety of challenges for your business, including:
Security issues
A large part of information security is limiting the avenues a malicious actor can take in compromising critical data. Vendor or content sprawl can leave multiple locations and/or applications vulnerable to hackers and other threats.
Friction in services
If your organization uses a multitude of applications, and those applications do not communicate smoothly, new inefficiencies arise. Data might need to be manually entered by employees as it’s moved along in a process, which can slow down business activities and result in more opportunities for human error.
Frustration for employees in an already ultra-competitive job market
In a world of remote work, where many job-seekers can pursue opportunities from anywhere in the world, it’s important for organizations to stay competitive as employers. Manual data entry, communication breakdowns and other inefficiencies resulting from vendor sprawl, may frustrate employees and lead them to subsequently jump ship.
How is vendor sprawl addressed?
Once vendor sprawl is identified, it can be difficult to overcome if not addressed properly. Here are a few steps your organization can take to minimize vendor sprawl:
Form a steering committee
The best way to start addressing vendor sprawl is by forming a group of employees with similar goals. Taking on a business challenges as a team can bring in a variety of expertise to the process as well as enable your organization to address issues quickly and efficiently.
Understand organizational needs
The overarching theme of how vendor sprawl scenarios start is an inability of organizations or teams to accurately identify business needs. Be sure to list any current needs in addition to as many future needs as your organization and its teams can reasonably identify. Having a list of needed functionality can help your organization better construct a digital ecosystem that works for everyone.
Address common business needs using existing applications
Once business needs are identified, look at your organization’s existing applications. If there’s an expected business need that an application you already have can address, or can address by being scaled up or updated, that may be the best option.
Additionally, if you’re finding that your digital ecosystem as it stands is not sufficiently meeting business needs, it may be time to reevaluate some core or legacy systems. It’s important to assess systems regularly, and whether they should be replaced with more flexible, scalable applications that can address a wider variety of current and potential future business challenges.
Integrate applications across the enterprise
Even when you use the most versatile applications possible, your organization will very likely have more than one or two applications in its digital ecosystem. In these cases, vendor sprawl can be mitigated with the right integrations that allow applications to exchange information easily. Integrations come in many forms: APIs, native functionality within existing applications, or custom solutions. Additionally, integration platforms as a service (iPaaS), help bring platforms together and ensure that the information they share is in a consistent format.
Don’t forget to iterate and change as technology evolves
One of the best pieces of advice one can give to organizations looking to mitigate vendor sprawl is to not get attached to one particular application or process. To keep pace with changes in the business climate, organizations can update their existing applications, replace them with more robust ones or add additional applications to their digital ecosystem. While adding additional applications may seem simple in the short term, it may be prudent to dig a layer deeper and examine how your existing applications function. The way they work now may be familiar, but a significant update or outright replacement of existing applications could go a long way in mitigating vendor sprawl.
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A great way to mitigate vendor sprawl is to have robust applications that can provide a wide range of functionality to meet business needs. With process automation, document management, records management and intelligent content capture capabilities, an enterprise content management (ECM) platform can be a boon for organizations looking for an application to meet most or all of their needs.
Check out the below resources to learn more about how ECM can help your business be more efficient.
Compare top enterprise content management (ECM) vendors on G2
By Joman Kwong, Laserfiche strategic solutions manager for financial services
Enhancing the customer experience and optimizing value chain operations are the primary driving forces behind the majority of insurance companies’ digital transformation initiatives in the next two years, as revealed by a recent survey conducted by Arizent Research and Digital Insurance in partnership with Laserfiche.
In May 2023, Arizent Research and Digital Insurance, on behalf of Laserfiche, surveyed 103 insurance leaders working in business process, back-office operations or IT at major insurance carriers.
“In the next two years, the top business priority driving digital transformation is creating a digital-first customer experience and improving customer satisfaction,” said Joman Kwong, strategic solutions manager for financial services at Laserfiche.
“This involves automating processes, such as self-service requests for policy quotes and claims processing, as well as automating frequent communications about the status of claims. These actions can reduce the paperwork burden for customers, enhance transparency, and enable better customer engagement.”
Enhancing Customer Experiences
Seventy-seven percent of insurers report that the majority or all of their digital transformation initiatives are centered around enhancing the customer experience (see Figure 1). In fact, six out of ten insurers indicate that their digital transformation efforts have progressed beyond the stage of digitizing and organizing information, focusing instead on automating and streamlining processes. The positive impact of these automation efforts on the customer experience has not gone unnoticed. Organizations that have increased the efficiency of their operational workflows are more inclined to label their digital transformation initiatives as customer-centric.
Figure 1: Insurers with efficient or fully automated workflows are more customer-centric
Driving Operational Productivity
More than half of insurers are currently exploring automated processes and seeking enhanced operational efficiency. However, despite these efforts, only a small fraction have fully achieved their automation goals. A mere 18% of insurers report that their operational workflows are fully automated and highly efficient. Even more concerning, 20% acknowledge that their operational workflows currently suffer from some degree of inefficiency.
One possible explanation for this lack of progress may be attributed to the absence of data centralization and effective system integrations, a challenge that becomes even more pronounced as organizations expand. Among respondents from organizations with 10,000 or more employees, 39% admit to grappling with information silos and disconnected applications.
Figure 2: Insurers run up against competing priorities, scarce resources and lack of training and talent when attempting to change workflow processes.
The need for automation in various facets of the business continues to grow. Notably, a lack of automation in internal processes could leave the vast majority of insurers (87%) who plan to implement remote or hybrid work models over the next two years unprepared. Without fully automated and efficient workflows, the risk of data loss, human errors, and disruptions in business continuity remains significant in geographically dispersed workplaces. Moreover, without real-time access to data, employees face limitations in their ability to support customers.
Leveraging The Right Technology for Vital Business Outcomes
The findings reveal a shift in priorities, as insurers are reevaluating the driving forces behind digital transformation in the insurance industry. To accomplish these objectives, it is essential to have a centralized information backbone, streamline data entry and processing across the organization, and ensure seamless data integration across various applications to support any automation initiatives.
While the capabilities of intelligent content capture can be robust, it’s not always easy to identify where and how to use this tool effectively. Below are a few use cases that highlight the benefits of implementing intelligent content capture within your organization.
While the capabilities of intelligent content capture can be robust, it’s not always easy to identify where and how to use this tool effectively. Below are a few use cases that highlight the benefits of implementing intelligent content capture within your organization.
Use cases for finance departments
A highly regulated part of any business, a finance department can find many benefits from utilizing intelligent content capture:
Customer invoicing: Reduce time spent processing invoices and matching purchase orders using technology that pulls data directly from appropriate documents.
Purchase order (PO) generation: Extract important information from scanned or imported purchase orders, making them easier to identify and match to invoices.
Invoice processing: Gather data directly from scanned or imported invoices, making invoice information easier to verify and match with relevant purchase orders.
Use cases for HR departments
As the department usually responsible for employee onboarding and support, human resources can be responsible for managing a large breadth of content on any given day. Here are a few ways deploying intelligent content capture can help:
Employee onboarding: Get employees started faster by extracting relevant information quickly from digitally submitted forms.
Vacation requests: Better plan for employee time off with the ability to quickly review information related to vacation requests.
Professional development requests: Support employee growth with fast response times to requests for professional development.
Employee forms and requests: Furnish requests quickly with digital forms that you can quickly gather relevant data from.
Use cases for legal and compliance departments
For legal and finance departments, accuracy and efficiency is an essential part of conducting business, and helping to ensure audits go smoothly. Below are some ways these departments can benefit from implementing intelligent content capture.
Sharing information with clients and customers: Utilize digital forms that can capture information directly from customer and client submission, limiting the need for email attachments that can come with the risk of being intercepted or compromised.
E-signatures: Enable convenient signing of a variety of documents with digital signatures that can be captured electronically via native functionality or using integrations with specialized e-signature software.
Use cases for supply chain management
Supply chain management can be a challenge for many businesses and can cause ripple effects throughout an organization if not managed correctly. Here are some ways intelligent content capture can be used to help those who manage supply chains gain new efficiencies:
Procurement: Get up-to-date information from parts inspections in the field with the ability to capture information from digital forms submitted online.
Quality control: Capture information directly from forms submitted online to drive efficiency during quality inspections.
Use cases for customer service departments
Customer service departments rely heavily on the accuracy of their information to provide the highest level of service possible. Here are some ways these departments can utilize intelligent content capture:
Customer satisfaction: Ensure customers are satisfied by collecting and referencing accurate, timely information on client calls and emails.
Application processing: Extract key pieces of information from applications for programs and services to better organize relevant documents and respond to requests.
Support ticket submissions: Gather submitted information automatically and accurately, helping to ensure faster turnaround times for support tickets.
Use cases for IT departments
Information technology departments are usually fielding many projects and requests at once. Without the right tools, resources can run thin quickly. Here are a few ways intelligent content capture can help your IT department utilize its resources effectively:
Case management: Capture data directly from documents relevant to cases, making information more convenient to store, retrieve and share.
Helpdesk support: Ensure quick turnaround times for helpdesk tickets with the ability to gather submitted information directly from incoming requests.
Use cases for sales teams
The more information salespeople have, the more empowered they are to inform customers and close deals. Here are some ways intelligent content capture can assist salespeople and their teams in generating revenue for their organizations:
Sales contracts: Extract key information directly from contracts, making them easier to sort through, locate, retrieve and organize.
Travel and expense requests: Furnish requests quickly with the ability to gather data directly from submitted forms.
Customer Spotlight: Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group
Discover how Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group wanted to deliver a more seamless experience for its staff and customers. Learn how intelligent content capture and other technologies helped the firm reach its goals.
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Compare top enterprise content management (ECM) vendors on G2
Intelligent content capture technology is powerful, but can be utilized even more effectively with the right ECM platform. Check out the G2 Grid® for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and compare top vendors on the market.
See what Laserfiche intelligent content capture can do for you
Laserfiche leverages intelligent content capture to automatically extract important information from content you use every day. Watch the video below to learn more about how it works.
While the feature set of an enterprise content management (ECM) system can be robust, it’s not always easy to identify where and how to use the tools effectively. Below are a few use cases that highlight the benefits of implementing an enterprise content management system in your organization.
Use cases for finance departments
A highly regulated part of any business, a finance department can find many benefits in using an ECM system:
Customer invoicing: Find new efficiency with the ability to quickly route documents to relevant parties, including key approvers and stakeholders, creating transparency throughout the invoice management process.
Cash flows: Gain a clear view of incoming and outgoing funds with processes you can follow using robust analytics dashboards.
Audits: Make auditors’ jobs easier with audit trails that give a detailed history of actions performed on each document in your repository.
Purchase order (PO) generation: Extract important information from scanned or imported purchase orders, making them easier to identify and match to invoices.
Invoice processing: Gather data directly from scanned or imported invoices, making invoice information easier to verify and match with relevant purchase orders.
Expense reimbursement: Streamline the expense reimbursement process with the ability to efficiently route documents between requesters and approvers.
Budget transfers: Enhance your organization’s ability to move allocated funds between departments with pre-built automation templates obtained from a solution marketplace.
General ledger: Support transparency in your organization’s reporting practices with properly stored and kept evidence of transactions.
Use cases for HR departments
As the department usually responsible for employee onboarding and support, human resources can have many processes to manage on any given day. Here are a few ways an ECM system can help:
Employee onboarding: Get employees started faster by automatically routing onboarding paperwork between them and the HR department.
Employee forms and requests: Enable a quick turnaround for employee requests with the ability to automatically direct forms and paperwork between stakeholders.
Employee information protection: Get automatic reminders to dispose of or archive information, so your organization can keep employee information for only as long as required by regulatory bodies.
Policy transparency: Keep a centralized repository for employee handbooks and other documents outlining policies, so employees always have easy access to them.
Status changes: Develop a referenceable system of record that tracks status changes as employees onboard, offboard and change roles.
Vacation requests: Give your organization the opportunity to field vacation requests more effectively with pre-built automation templates obtained from a solution marketplace.
Professional development requests: Support employee growth with fast response times to requests for professional development using forms submitted electronically.
Performance reviews: Keep information on employee performance protected in a repository with robust security controls.
Timesheets: Get automatic reminders of when timesheets are due and automatically route information to approvers.
Benefits enrollment: Automatically set reminders to notify employees of key benefits enrollment deadlines.
Use cases for legal and compliance departments
For legal and finance departments, accuracy and efficiency is an essential part of conducting business, and helping to ensure audits of their organizations go smoothly. Below are some ways these departments can benefit from using an ECM system.
Sharing information with clients and customers: Utilize digital forms that can capture information directly from customer and client submission, limiting the need for email attachments that can come with the risk of being intercepted or compromised.
Legal review and contract approvals: Speed up approval processes with process automation functionality that directs information to appropriate stakeholders with ease.
eDiscovery: Keep content for as long as legally necessary, to support your organization’s efforts to fulfill its duties during the discovery process.
Contract negotiation: Version control capabilities make it easy to track significant revisions as contracts are changed and edited by relevant parties.
E-signatures: Enable convenient signing of a variety of documents with digital signatures that can be captured electronically via native functionality or using integrations with specialized e-signature software.
Retention schedules: Set reminders for records managers to dispose of or archive records in alignment with their retention schedules.
Legal holds: Change and keep track of legal hold statuses for records that are involved in ongoing litigation.
Use cases for supply chain management
Supply chain management can be a challenge for many businesses and can cause ripple effects throughout an organization if not regarded as critically important to operations. Here are some use cases for ECM systems that can help those who manage supply chains identify opportunities for new efficiencies:
Procurement: Get up-to-date information from parts inspections in the field with the ability to capture information from digital forms submitted online.
Operations: Identify bottlenecks with analytics dashboards that enable your organization to get an informative overview of ongoing processes.
Incoming materials and outgoing products: Leverage powerful process dashboards to identify trends in how your organization is procuring materials and producing products.
Quality control: Use pre-built automation templates from a solution marketplace to build workflows that streamline how quality control information is collected and delivered.
Use cases for customer service departments
Customer service departments rely heavily on the accuracy of their information in order to provide the highest level of service possible. Here are some ways an ECM system can help these departments:
Customer requests for service: Meet the needs of customers on their schedule with the ability to provide automated service as requests come in.
Customer satisfaction: Ensure customers are satisfied by collecting accurate information, extracted directly from submitted forms.
Case management: Easily route information between team members to stay up to date on cases and provide automatic status updates for customers.
Application processing: Extract key pieces of information from applications for programs and services to better organize relevant documents and respond to requests.
Public records and information: Increase transparency with public portals that deliver information to customers upon request.
Customer service follow-up: Enable any staff member to provide follow-ups to requests with automation tools that make case information easy to move between team members.
Support ticket submissions: Gather submitted information automatically and accurately, helping to ensure faster turnaround times for support tickets.
Use cases for IT departments
Information technology departments are usually fielding many projects and requests at once. Without the right tools, resources can run thin quickly. Here are a few ways an ECM system can help your IT department utilize its resources effectively:
Case management: Capture data directly from documents relevant to cases, making information more convenient to store, retrieve and share.
Data analysis and insights: Gain actionable insights on processes department-wide with robust analytics dashboards.
Information governance: Utilize audit trails to track when, and by whom, actions were performed on your organization’s content.
Helpdesk support: Help ensure quick turnaround times for helpdesk tickets with the ability to gather submitted information directly from incoming requests.
Support resource hosting: Provide a centralized repository that employees can easily access for FAQs, documentation and guides.
Network access requests: Leverage automation to accelerate approvals of requests from staff to access applications and functionality critical to their roles.
Hardware device checkout: Collect information that can identify devices rented by employees, and store that information in a secure repository, so your organization can effectively keep track of equipment.
Use cases for sales teams
The more information salespeople have, the more empowered they are to inform customers and close deals. Here are some ways an ECM system can assist salespeople and their teams in generating revenue for your organization:
Sales contracts: Extract key information directly from contracts, making them easier to sort through, locate, retrieve and organize.
Sales tools: Provide a centralized repository that makes it easy for salespeople to access proposals, presentations and other sales tools.
Travel and expense requests: Jumpstart workflows your organization can use to furnish requests quickly using pre-built automation templates from a solution marketplace.
Opportunity tracking: Quickly store and retrieve quotes, invoices and other sales materials to get a better view of prospective deals available to your sales team.
Use cases for business continuity
Whether an individual unit or a group of individual experts across multiple departments, teams need effective tools to mitigate the risk that comes with disruptions to business. Here are a few ways an ECM system can assist your organization in its efforts to create a more resilient enterprise:
Remote content access: When your office is inaccessible, host a cloud repository that enables employees to access any and all content they need from anywhere.
Data security and privacy: Records management tools can help ensure your organization keeps records for only as long as needed, reducing the amount of data vulnerable to security and privacy breaches if they occur.
Communicating with customers: Facilitate customer requests for information and services from anywhere with online portals.
Business continuity planning: Leverage digital, automated workflows to keep processes moving, even if in-person staff are unavailable.
Disaster recovery: Host your content on a cloud infrastructure that’s supported by multiple availability zones to minimize data loss after disruptions.
Crisis management: Automate key crisis management processes to boost your organization’s ability to respond effectively in critical situations.
Business impact analysis: Evaluate performance of key processes during simulated disruptions with analytics tools to get an overview of your organization’s preparedness.
Customer Spotlight: Learning Arts
Learn how Learning Arts, a company dedicated to the care of children with autism, leveraged ECM to share data about patients with their parents and behavior specialists in real-time to enhance care and programming.
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While the feature set of a business process management (BPM) platform can be robust, it’s not always easy to identify where and how to use the tools effectively. Below are a few use cases that highlight the benefits of implementing business process management within your organization.
Use cases for finance departments
A highly regulated part of any business, a finance department can find many benefits in using a BPM platform:
Customer invoicing: Find new efficiency with the ability to quickly route documents to relevant parties, including key approvers and stakeholders, creating transparency throughout the invoice management process.
Cash flows: Gain a clear view of incoming and outgoing funds with processes you can follow using robust analytics dashboards.
Invoice processing: Automatically extract relevant data from scanned or imported invoices, making invoice information easier to verify and match with relevant purchase orders.
Expense reimbursement: Streamline the expense reimbursement process with the ability to efficiently route documents between requesters and approvers.
Budget transfers: Enhance your organization’s ability to move allocated funds between departments with prebuilt automation templates from a solution marketplace.
Use cases for HR departments
As the department responsible for employee onboarding and support, Human Resources can have many processes to manage on any given day. Here are a few ways a BPM platform can help:
Employee onboarding: Get employees started faster by automatically routing onboarding paperwork between them and the HR department.
Employee forms and requests: Enable a quick turnaround for employee requests with the ability to automatically direct forms and paperwork between stakeholders.
Vacation requests: Give your organization the opportunity to field vacation requests more effectively with prebuilt automation templates obtained from a solution marketplace.
Professional development requests: Support employee growth with fast response times to requests for professional development, using tools that can route information automatically to relevant parties.
Timesheets: Get automatic reminders of when timesheets are due and automatically route information to approvers.
Benefits enrollment: Automatically set reminders to notify employees of key benefits enrollment deadlines.
Use cases for legal and compliance departments
For legal and finance departments, accuracy and efficiency is an essential part of conducting business, and helping to ensure audits of their organizations go smoothly. Below are some ways these departments can benefit from using a BPM platform.
Legal review and contract approvals: Speed up approval processes with process automation functionality that directs information to appropriate stakeholders with ease.
Contract negotiation: Quickly route contracts between relevant parties as items are updated or changed, and use integrated digital signature tools for signoff.
Use cases for supply chain management
Supply chain management can be a challenge for many businesses and can cause ripple effects throughout an organization if not regarded as critically important to operations. Here are some use cases for BPM platforms that can help supply chain managers create new efficiencies:
Procurement: Enable a responsive and quick-to-act procurement process with the ability to move information about materials readily between appropriate stakeholders.
Operations: Identify bottlenecks with analytics dashboards that enable your organization to get an informative overview of ongoing processes.
Incoming materials and outgoing products: Leverage powerful process dashboards to identify trends in how your organization is procuring materials and producing products.
Quality control: Use prebuilt automation templates from a solution marketplace to build workflows that streamline how quality control information is collected and delivered.
Use cases for customer service departments
Customer service departments rely heavily on the accuracy of their information in order to provide the highest level of service possible. Here are some ways a BPM platform can help:
Customer requests for service: Meet the needs of customers on their schedule with the ability to provide automated service as requests come in.
Case management: Easily route information between team members to stay up to date on cases and provide automatic status updates for customers.
Application processing: Automatically route applications for services and programs to the appropriate approvers.
Customer service follow-up: Enable any staff member to provide follow-ups to requests with automation tools that make case information easy to move between team members.
Support ticket submissions: Quickly route support tickets to relevant personnel based on expertise and availability.
Use cases for IT departments
Information technology departments are usually fielding many projects and requests at once. Without the right tools, resources can run thin quickly. Here are a few ways a BPM platform can help your IT department utilize its resources effectively:
Case management: Provide automatic status updates on cases and easily route relevant case information between team members as needed.
Data analysis and insights: Gain actionable insights on processes department-wide with robust analytics dashboards.
Helpdesk support: Streamline operations and information-routing with prebuilt automation templates obtained from a solution marketplace.
Network access requests: Leverage automation to accelerate approvals of requests from staff to access applications and functionality critical to their roles.
Use cases for sales teams
The more information salespeople have, the more empowered they are to inform customers and close deals. Here are some ways a BPM platform can assist Sales teams in generating revenue for their organizations:
Sales contracts: Accelerate deals with the ability to automatically route contracts between relevant parties as items are updated.
Travel and expense requests: Jumpstart workflows your organization can use to furnish requests quickly using prebuilt automation templates from a solution marketplace.
Use cases for business continuity
Whether an individual unit or a group of individual experts across multiple departments, teams need effective tools to mitigate the risk that comes with disruptions to business. Here are a few ways a BPM platform can assist your organization in its efforts to create a more resilient enterprise:
Communicating with customers: Keep customers up to date on requests for information and services from anywhere with automation tools.
Business continuity planning: Leverage digital, automated workflows to keep processes moving, even if in-person staff are unavailable.
Crisis management: Automate key crisis management processes to boost your organization’s ability to respond effectively in critical situations.
Business impact analysis: Evaluate performance of key processes during simulated disruptions with analytics tools to get an overview of your organization’s preparedness.
Customer Spotlight: Sky Telecommunications
Learn how the HR department at leading telecommunications company Sky was able to deliver more efficient services for its 25,000 employees by leveraging automation.
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While the feature set of a records management system can be robust, it’s not always easy to identify where and how to use the tools effectively. Below are a few use cases that highlight the benefits of implementing electronic records management within your organization.
Use Cases for Finance Departments
A highly regulated part of any business, a finance department can find many benefits in implementing electronic records management:
Customer invoicing: Keep a historical record of invoices and purchase orders for as long as they’re needed or required.
Compliance: Automate reminders to perform records management actions, such as archival and disposal, to promote regulatory compliance.
General ledger: Support transparency in your organization’s reporting practices with properly stored and kept evidence of transactions.
Use Cases for HR Departments
As the department responsible for employee onboarding and support, human resources manages many records that contain sensitive and regulated information. Here are a few electronic records management use cases for HR:
Employee information protection: Get automatic reminders to dispose of or archive information, so your organization can keep employee information for only as long as required by regulatory bodies.
Status changes: Develop a referenceable system of record that tracks status changes as employees onboard, offboard and change roles.
Use Cases for Legal and Compliance Departments
For legal and finance departments, accuracy and efficiency is an essential part of conducting business, and helping to ensure audits of their organizations go smoothly. Below are some common electronic records management use cases for these departments.
Retention schedules: Set reminders for records managers to dispose of or archive records in alignment with their retention schedules.
Legal holds: Change and keep track of legal hold statuses for records that are involved in ongoing litigation.
Regulatory compliance: Stay In good standing with regulators using a system that enables proper adherence to retention schedules and other information governance guidelines.
eDiscovery: Keep content for as long as legally necessary, to support your organization’s efforts to fulfill its duties during the discovery process.
Use Cases for Business Continuity
Whether an individual unit or a group of individual experts across multiple departments, teams need effective tools to mitigate the risk that comes with disruptions to business. Here are a couple of ways electronic records management can assist your organization in its efforts to create a more resilient enterprise:
Remote access to records: When your office is inaccessible, host a cloud repository that enables access to records as needed for internal use, litigation or audits.
Data security and privacy: Records management tools can help ensure your organization keeps records for only as long as needed, reducing the amount of data vulnerable to security and privacy breaches if they occur.
Customer Spotlight: City of Ithaca/Tompkins County
Learn how one county in New York reduced the time to furnish records in response to FOIA requests by more than half.
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, data plays a crucial role in every business operation. From customer information to financial records, organizations deal with massive amounts of data on a daily basis. Extracting meaningful insights and automating processes requires efficient tools, and one such tool that was developed nearly 50 years ago and has stood the test of time is regular expressions (regex) for searching, finding, replacing, or validating text. However, a regex is notoriously difficult to work with, mostly due to the complex memorization of rules needed to create expressions and challenging nature in reading and troubleshooting them.
The Laserfiche RegEx Builder utilizes Generative AI to help users natively build and update regular expressions with much less coding. Instead of building solutions from scratch, the Laserfiche RegEx Builder can be used to accelerate the process of turning ideas into a usable piece of code that can be integrated into a Laserfiche Form, dramatically shortening the time from idea to delivery.
The Power of Regular Expressions
Regular expressions are powerful tools used for pattern matching and data manipulation. They provide a concise and flexible way to search, validate, and extract information from text strings. With regex, developers and data scientists can perform complex data operations with ease, saving time and effort. Whether it’s parsing log files, extracting email addresses, or validating user input, regex offer a versatile solution for handling various data processing tasks.
The Challenges of Regex
While a regex is a valuable asset, expressions can be daunting for those unfamiliar with their syntax and intricacies. Constructing complex regex patterns often requires a deep understanding of the language, and mistakes lead to inaccurate results. Moreover, regex patterns become convoluted and challenging to maintain as requirements evolve and expressions grow larger. These challenges hinder productivity and limit the potential benefits of regex.
AI Empowers Regex Users
Artificial intelligence, with its ability to analyze patterns, learn from data, and make intelligent predictions, significantly enhances the productivity of regex builders. By leveraging AI, regex users can now automate various aspects of regex pattern creation and optimization, empowering users with enhanced efficiency and accuracy.
Smart Pattern Recommendations
AI-powered regex builders using large language models (LLMs) process large datasets and offer intelligent pattern recommendations. These models identify common patterns and suggest suitable regex expressions, reducing the time spent on trial and error. By learning from existing data, AI provides regex users with insights and suggestions that improve the quality of their patterns.
Error Detection and Correction
AI can assist regex users by detecting and correcting errors in their expressions. By analyzing the syntax and semantics of the regex, AI algorithms can identify potential issues and provide suggestions for improvement. This helps prevent runtime errors and ensures the accuracy of the regex patterns.
Automated Testing and Validation
Validating regex patterns against sample data can be time-consuming, particularly when dealing with complex expressions. AI can automate this process by generating relevant test cases and validating the regex patterns against them. This ensures that the expressions work as intended, saving developers the effort of manual testing.
Integration with Automated Business Processes
AI-powered regex builders seamlessly integrate with existing workflows, streamlining the creation and deployment of regex patterns. They can be integrated into programming languages, data processing pipelines, or text editors, allowing users to harness the power of regex within their preferred environments.
Leveraging the Capabilities of AI
Regular expressions have long been a valuable tool for data manipulation and analysis. With the assistance of the Laserfiche RegEx Builder, enterprises can unlock new levels of productivity by automating the creation, optimization, and validation of regex patterns. The Laserfiche RegEx Builder is just one example of deploying AI at scale — or using AI to streamline operations across the enterprise. By harnessing the power of AI to accelerate the creation of a powerful tool for process automation, organizations can achieve their goals of enterprise-wide digital transformation.
The Future of AI and Laserfiche
Laserfiche is embracing a new era of computing and productivity — and this is just the beginning of it. We’re excited to explore AI and introduce you to new AI-powered capabilities and innovations with Laserfiche in the coming months.
