Enterprise Content Management

 Enterprise content management (ECM) – sometimes referred to as document management or records management – is the process (strategies, methods, and tools) of managing the entire lifecycle of an organization’s content, including Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, PDF files and scanned images. The goal of ECM is to reduce risk and improve productivity, efficiency, and customer service via the elimination of paper-based tasks and the enhancement of process visibility.  

• Enterprise content management is an umbrella term for the technology, strategy and method used to capture, manage, access, integrate, measure, and store information.  
• The value of today's enterprise content management software goes beyond simple scan, store and retrieve solutions. The ideal enterprise content management solution encompasses all of the platform’s capabilities and strengths.   
• Sometimes the term transactional content management is used – but it’s only part of ECM. As mentioned, ECM is an umbrella term and transactional content management, often associated with business processed that help drive actions and decisions, is just another term under that umbrella.
• Think of enterprise content management more like your enterprise content strategy. Remember, ECM has evolved into a term more associated with business processes and content strategies than as an enterprise content management system.
• ECM is evolving into content services. Traditional ECM no longer fully reflects the way users create, use and interact with information. A successful content services approach  can help you tackle these changes and combat information silos by delivering the right information to the right people at the right time

The primary function of ECM is to simultaneously reduce clutter while increasing data and process visibility and accessibility, ultimately saving time and significantly lowering costs.

ECM will help you:

• Archive information quickly and access it quickly from wherever you are and whenever you need it
• Eliminate paperwork and make whatever records-keeping you were doing via paper far more accessible and efficient
• Organize and structure your company’s data in a way that makes it easy to cross-reference, providing invaluable context around and transparency into process