Do More With Less: Three Sure-Fire Strategies for Manufacturers – Enterprise Content Management

This is the third segment of my “doing more with less issue” and it deals with enterprise content management (ECM).

Companies generally invest in ECM solutions to address specific business problems dealing with email and electronic records management, collaboration, search, reporting and analytics, and ad-hoc or structured workflow—all essential tools that enable an administrative framework to bloom. These are also the tools required to begin capturing, preserving, and re-using the intellectual knowledge that flourishes across the enterprise.

Using an ECM strategy to support an information governance program helps to manage problems with content-loss risks and knowledge leaks before the business is adversely affected. Managed repositories of corporate content, that are accessible across business units or geographies, serve critical channels of information distribution, even after the originating author leaves the organization. An ECM deployment ensures that content is securely controlled in the context of its business function. ECM can also serve as the cornerstone for content collection and protection initiatives for e-discovery and regulatory needs.

Although manufacturing productivity has been greatly improved by ERP systems, which do reduce inventory times and increase quality, there is still a great deal more to be done. By embedding ECM within an organization’s ERP application, business transformation is enhanced. An integrated ECM-ERP application allows an organization to build a unified environment for their business users, reducing duplication of effort, and providing a flexible environment for collaboration. It also provides interoperability between content that was once disconnected by applications, allowing for faster process-associated decisions to be made organization-wide. Manufacturing departments can further benefit when they adopt ECM solutions to efficiently document the many steps in the manufacturing process, which aids with the adherence to regulatory requirements.

In The Deep Art of Enterprise Content Management, Jim Murphy says: “Rather than existing separately from established systems, like ERP, content management acts as an extension of them allowing for exceptions to the repeatable processes governed by ERP, as well as recognizing and capturing processes and data that should be managed in those systems.”

Capturing the Value of Information

With the administrative framework acting as a backbone, and information about assets optimized, the day-to-day interactions between people, process, and information becomes much more efficient and effective. To take full advantage of this connection, an unobstructed view into all sources of related information is essential.

Inherent to manufacturing companies is the need to anticipate problems, modify fixed assets (for tasks like de-bottlenecking), and to meet technological and business changes. In essence, an enterprise must plan for change, manage change, track change, and resolve the problems that change causes. Managing change, especially where hazardous materials are involved, is one of the largest business processes for a facility. If not done properly, change mismanagement proves costly and problematic for any organization.

Regardless of one’s role or discipline, managing a problem becomes significantly more difficult if correct, current information is unavailable. The need to search for diversified information about a fixed asset, such as drawings, procedures, contracts, and other vital documents, becomes ever so critical when planning for change. Decisions based on poor or missing information, or outdated versions of documents, compound mistakes and augment costs. But information visibility, through the integration of an ECM Suite with an ERP system, exposes all transactional data to ensure accuracy, speed, and utmost value.