Technology rules when tightening the belt
By Catherine Woods, published 2 years ago in Business Technology.
Technology entrepreneur Sam Ferguson has saved his company £1.5m in costs after streamlining processes at EDM, a document management specialist.
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“We changed boardroom management. And part of it was modernising processes,” he says.
“Larger companies find it more difficult to change quickly. Entrepreneurial companies, by their very nature, have to be more fleet of foot to take advantage of an upturn or a downturn. We’re forever looking at ways of making our internal processes more efficient.”
Ferguson set up Edotech, a transactional document processing solutions unit, for Barclays Bank in the mid nineties and, in 1999, led an MBO for the venture. Five years later he sold the company to business support services group Astron for £130m. He became CEO of EDM in 2006.
Ferguson says for companies that use a lot of paper, such as those setting up new customers, implementing document management solutions is another way to ramp down costs as times get tougher.
“It’s not expensive and most companies get payback in less than six months," according to Ferguson. "We reckon the average saving is about 40 per cent a year.”
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1 comment.
Ben Richmond 1 year ago.
Dear Editor,
There are definitely considerable benefits to the use of Enterprise Content Management, of which document management is only a part, not only reduction in paper wastage. The savings, and indeed the profits, that can be gained from true ECM are tremendous. ECM maximises business efficiency and reduces costs – vital considerations for organisations facing a recession. It is about the effective use of content; sharing or re-using material to meet diverse operational requirements. There is none of the wasteful duplication of information. This is turn allows employees to work quickly saving valuable company time.
The market is already littered with horror stories about organisations that have purchased thousands of ECM software licenses and yet, years on, have only a few hundred users in one. The key problem here is a widespread lack of understanding. Despite the hype and excitement about ECM, the majority of organisations have not fully grasped ECM. Without this understanding projects will fail to meet expectations and the potential of this powerful solution set will never be realised.
A best practice approach has to be taken which is based upon the businesses requirements and a clear understanding of ECM. There are four clear steps recommended to achieving an ECM strategy: understand what ECM is, develop a joined up ECM strategy, devise best practice for implementation of that strategy and define a blueprint to measure ongoing organisational ECM effectiveness. It is only once these key issues have been addressed that the ECM market can realise its full potential. Yours sincerely,
Ben Richmond Founder and CEO The Content Group www.thecontentgroup.co.uk