Implementing enterprise content management (ECM) has been a priority for most companies for several years now. In large part, the focus has been on establishing a central repository for storing and managing access to information assets of diverse types. In some cases, companies have also established workflows for controlling the development and approval of assets in the repository.

As companies evaluate how to bring new efficiencies to their processes, however, they are recognizing the limitations of ECM systems in driving process improvement. Since many processes span multiple ECM systems, instances and organizations, it is difficult to implement end-to-end orchestration and visibility with ECM. At the individual user level, efficiencies are gained by streamlining the steps required to complete a task. However, this often requires integration to external systems and the construction of interactive interfaces this is not a strength of ECM.

As a result of these and other limitations, many companies have chosen to implement BPM to leverage their existing ECM investments but also establish a platform for the next round of process improvements.

BPM Opportunity

In evaluating BPM, many companies find that it will help them not only for a specific process but also serve as a platform for improving any process that leverages their ECM platform for key information assets. With BPM, they expect to realize the following benefits:

• Streamline tasks that involve multiple systems. Guide users through complex tasks by aggregating information from diverse systems in a single, efficient, Wizard-based interface.
• Deliver end-to-end visibility and control for compliance. Give companies an accurate, real-time audit trail of process execution — no matter how many different ECM systems or instances are involved.
• Provide real-time process control. Give managers real-time insight into process bottlenecks and the ability to adjust thresholds to improve performance.
• Leverage Existing Assets and Metadata. Real-time integration to ECM systems allows the processes to use information assets and their metadata as well as interact with existing ECM workflows.
• Implement Activity and Event Monitoring Beyond. Monitor external systems for events that move processes forward but are typically outside the view of ECM systems — like receipt of a premium payment in a billing system.
• Respond to Change Effectively. Revise processes to respond to organizational or regulatory changes — in days if necessary.

Lombardi In Action

One global insurance provider deployed BPM to streamline their invoice reconciliation process. While their ECM solution stored all of the images of original and annotated invoices, the company needed a solution that could help streamline the work of research teams that needed to research invoice disputes. The BPM solution helped reduce by 80% the amount of manual effort required to reconcile invoices. This was achieved through automated routing and prioritization of invoices, consolidated user interfaces for research teams and real-time controls for managers to set automatic approval thresholds to facilitate straight through processing.