Electronic Records Management is an important initiative undertaken by any organization and has been a priority for both public and private sector organizations for a long time. But, despite well established operating procedures and several options available in the market, organizations are still struggling to outline an effective electronic records management strategy that can sustain for at least a decade and ensure successful implementation of an Electronic Records Management system (EDRMS).
Well, there is no easy answer to this problem. However, if one understands business needs and creates a records management strategy taking future requirements into consideration, it can lead to a successful record management initiative that would serve an organization for a longer period of time.
So with my experience of implementing and overseeing large and complex records management implementations, here are some insights and key suggestions that can help you overcome major roadblocks.
See the Bigger Picture
Record Management Systems, sometimes, are implemented as an initiative of a local team trying to solve their departmental problems. In such cases, organizations misses an opportunity to lay a strong foundation for an organization-wide record management implementation and limits itself merely to a local system which does not suffice in the long run. Such system soon becomes inadequate and obsolete. So, don’t let too much focus on your current pain areas result in an inadequate blueprint. The bigger picture blueprint should include:
Centralized Records management policies -This is the heart of a robust RMS and system should offer support for- defining taxonomies, record numbering schemes, retention & disposition policies, off-lining policies, data transfer schemes to National Archive etc.
End-to-end content management – The focus of your strategy should be on managing complete lifecycle from capture, processing to archival of all content types such as – paper records, emails, scanned copies, social media content etc.
Integration with other enterprise & workgroup systems (especially email)
To ensure that you are on the right track, you can use certain certification guidelines such as DOD 5015.2, VERS and MOREQ. Out of these, DOD 5015.2 is the most comprehensive and dependable. Also, certified RMS software products available in market, greatly de-risks your implementation by providing comprehensive and compliant features.
What to opt for – bespoke or force-fit system?
As a part of your implementation strategy, going for detailed customization is not an option. There is no point, indulging in some complex software development when good options are readily available for use. The question is how to implement a good product effectively. Depending on varying business needs, specific customizations may be required in the system. So while implementing, one should look out for:
Storage Management – A good RMS product should offer a customizable framework and options for physical record management as per organization warehouse layout (if physical records are managed in-house).
Scalability – system should be scalable to any other unique process in the organization
Bar-Code/RFID integration
The key point here is that your RMS strategy should be a good blend of – a robust product with customizable framework, so that it’s a perfect fit for your business needs.
Managing complexity v/s ease-of-use tradeoff
With all due-diligence and consideration of the above points, it may still lead to low adoption as solution is expected to be a complex one. An easy-to-use records management system and comprehensive records management system are considered as two separate ends of a spectrum, as regulatory compliances demand a lot of sophisticated and complex rules/options to be setup. Most of the organizations take it as a training and hand-holding issue and believe that over a period of time users will get used to working on a complex screen. Well, this is a lethal mistake to make instead managing this trade-off should be part of your strategy
Some suggestions to make a comprehensive and easy-to-use records management system a success:
Have a separate desktop for day-to-day operations & policy/record administration – Setting up policies and administering them needs complex and detailed features such as – configuring taxonomy, retention rules, managing disposition etc. But these activities are periodic in nature and end users may not even need to access such complex functionality. What an end user requires is a desktop with common functionalities like searching a record, digitally using it, requesting hard copy etc. Even Record Managers, can perform operations like filing, managing request and notifications on much simpler interface. With a separate system, you also ensure more security as full policy desktop would be owned by Record Administrator only.
Use case based mobile app – Mobility is set to disrupt some traditional ways of record management. Record capture and quick filing through mobile, quick access and action on a request and stock tracking though mobile using barcodes are some examples that will set the pace for implementation and offer convenience to users.
Intelligent filing suggestions – Auto-suggestions based on context information available within a document would simplify record filing.
Planning for more use cases Look for more such options in your use case.
Strategize for riding technology led changes
We have witnessed the email era; when email took over business communications and it demanded our record systems to change. Record management systems struggled to adapt and manage the new and different kind of content format with attachment, body, index and threaded communication. It took a long time for vendors to cope with this new advent and many locally developed system could not match the speed, hence, vanished.
Today, Social Media content poses the same threat. It is again a different format type that government organizations need to track and record in their Record Management System. This new content type has emerged as both an opportunity and threat to record management and should be a key parameter to be considered for your RMS strategy. So, while choosing your preferred vendor, add this parameter to your checklist.
Concluding
With this quick guide, we aim to help you create a fool-proof records management strategy and adopt the right system addressing your business needs. We have tried to highlight and address some important issues, if these handled well, it can really make a big difference in creating a long lasting and efficient records management strategy. As efficient records management system will serve as the basis for effective service delivery and public accountability.
Climate change continues to pose an existential threat to the global economy. While the impact is felt across different industries, financial institutions are at the forefront of being the change agents. With the world waking up and moving towards low carbon emissions, banks have a major role in enabling this change.
Sustainability for modern financial institutions is not just limited to going paperless or becoming carbon neutral. It incorporates Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) into traditional banking aimed at achieving Sustainable Development Goals3 (SDGs).
Enabling, Accelerating Digital and Sustainable Banking with a Modern Content Services Platform
A key aspect of a purposeful organization is authenticity, with ESG at its core. In this blog, let’s explore how viable modern content services platforms facilitate sustainability priorities in banking, including net-zero emissions, paperless banking, energy efficiency, social goodwill, and brand strengthening—enabling financial institutions to digitally transform and be future-ready.
Paperless Banking: Digital Loan Origination
Traditionally, the customer lending origination process is paper-intensive. It requires application forms and document submission for the pre-qualification process, including copies of identity documents, employment proof, salary slip, bank statement, and previous loan statement. That’s a whole lot of documents from a single applicant. Imagine how many papers are daily printed and submitted to the banks with millions of borrowers globally!
Here’s exactly where the modern content service platform comes into the picture. The platform enables banks to eliminate the traditional ways of managing documents with capabilities to scan, extract, classify, and intelligently upload, share, and store documents. It facilitates banks to transit to paperless banking without compromising their service offerings to reach net-zero emission targets. Once the financial institution embarks on this journey towards paperless banking, emissions from paper production, transportation, physical storage facilities, and electricity will undoubtedly be reduced.
Digital Customer Onboarding
COVID-19 has accelerated the pace and, more importantly, the acceptance and adoption of digital technologies. Account opening can be done paperless by visiting the bank’s website or mobile app and keying in account opening information, such as personal details, scanning or clicking your documents using a mobile camera, and uploading your picture and e-signature. A modern content services platform can organize this data and make it accessible to backend business processes. Having the right platform helps users securely maintain their information over time, allowing them to correct documents, read them on various devices, annotate or collaborate in an electronically-driven environment. This saves a lot of paper, which otherwise gets wasted due to errors, misprints, or multiple copies, and creates a seamless customer experience. Furthermore, it saves the transportation costs from not needing to send the paper waste for recycling and equips an organization to ensure on-demand audit-readiness of documents.
Customer Digital Lifecycle Journey
Traditionally, several phases and sub-phases of a customer lifecycle involve paper-based processes, including data collection of an applicant, document analysis, data enrichment, KYC case review, ongoing customer services, and customer-off boarding. The cycle continues if you succeed in up-sell or cross-sell any new product to customers in between. The modern content services platform can overcome this manual handling process and transform the digital customer lifecycle into a paperless one. The platform helps digitize documents, classify information, extract data, collaborate, and electronically store while significantly minimizing paper usage and costs. Features like e-forms, e-signatures, video KYC, and conversational interfaces can reduce paper trails and help in delivering a superior customer experience.
Energy Efficiency: Green IT through Cloud
On-premise infrastructure must be operational irrespective of the transactional load consuming considerable energy in computing, lighting, and cooling the data centers. Cloud is at the heart of energy savings. Today’s modern content services platforms leverage the cloud effortlessly, enabling business leaders to offer optimized and effective services to banks while consuming considerably fewer resources.
Energy Efficiency through Compression Techniques
Raconteur estimates that by 2025, nearly 463 exabytes of data will be created each day globally.5 Banks are responsible for a sizable chunk of this data, consuming computer resources and energy. Modern content services platforms employ efficient compression techniques to reduce data size, saving computing storage and electricity. The energy savings will compound exponentially with data growth.
Social Goodwill and Brand Strengthening: Financial Inclusion
A modern content services platform and other digital technologies are crucial in taking banking to remote places. Today, a field agent can take a portable device to remote areas and collect customer information, signature, and identity proofs – all paperless, effortlessly bringing them into the banking system. Financial products like account opening, loan origination, payments, and card statements are offered digitally with this platform.
Green Banking
Apart from reducing operational emissions, banks encourage their customers to go paperless as an initiator of change. Banks provide loans for sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, or any other environment-based projects at a reduced lending rate. A truly digital bank can also help its customers and vendors go paperless by substituting paper-based documents with digital ones. In doing so, banks extend their commitment towards ‘net-zero’ in their operations, suppliers, customers, and the entire supply chain.
Brand Strengthening through ESG Data Analytics
A modern content services platform coupled with data, analytics, and System of Record (SoR) drives ESG metrics measurement and insights. The content services platform can extract data from sources and databases like customers’, suppliers’, social, satellite imagery, HR and government reports, etc., to feed into the analytics platforms to gain powerful insights. An example could be measuring agricultural and green energy loans annually to determine the contribution to CO2 emission reduction. Intersecting this data with country-wide CO2 emissions can help banks measure their ESG impact per year for a country or region.
The Way Forward
A modern content service platform paves the way for the contemporary approach to bringing sustainability to banks. The platform not only enables banks and financial institutions to protect the environment but also extends a helping hand with financial inclusion.
A content services platform is the ideal approach for optimizing business performance through efficient utilization of enterprise content. It can enable your organization to create, collaborate, share, transform, and leverage content for deriving business value.
The platform, backed with capabilities such as audio-video management, content analytics, cloud computing, records management, and others, enables secure document collaboration, facilitates anytime-anywhere information access, and helps derive valuable insights.
Unleash the Power of Content with Content Services Platform
Here are six ways in which a content services platform can help you efficiently leverage content:
Ensuring Content Governance and Compliance: Ensure complete content governance for regulatory compliance. Create labels and policies, such as retention, disposition, and storage, to manage records while complying with various regulatory standards.
Enabling Efficient Content Extraction: Extract critical data from paper and digital documents to enhance operational efficiency and reduce errors. Aggregate documents from disparate sources, make them legible, extract data with precision while continuously improving extraction accuracy.
Facilitating Secure Information Access: Enable anytime-anywhere information access and real-time collaboration. Empower employees with smart search and intelligent recommendations.
Driving Contextual Engagement: Capture, manage, and consume content generated in the context of business processes. Derive context from information, residing across various sources, and deliver personalized communications to customers across multiple touchpoints.
Streamlining Content Lifecycle Management: Create, manage, share, and archive different types of content while enabling easy and secure access.
Enabling Hybrid Records Management: Manage various records, including e-mails, physical, and electronic records, while retaining their integrity and authenticity. Create and manage multiple classification schemes for records that help in easy search and retrieval.
Imagine a scenario where your accounts department sends an invoice to your customer with a wrong address or a missing invoice number. May sound like minor glitches, but the impact could be major. It will delay the payment while leaving a dent on your goodwill. Last thing on your wish list. Right?
Well, any transactional delay in the processing of invoices hampers the production cycle, leading to revenue loss. And, when there are multiple offices of the same entity in different locations, efficient management of invoices becomes even more critical. In such cases, the invoicing users struggle to keep pace with the high volume of transactions. And, eventually, the leadership team starts facing difficulties due to lack of transparency in the process.
In order to avoid being impacted by a slow and opaque process, a reality check of the process becomes extremely important. Ask yourself:
Do you face difficulty in verifying invoices with corresponding documents in real-time?
Does it get difficult to manage mismatched data across purchase orders, invoices, and goods receipt notes?
Do you seek swift and efficient management of exceptions while processing invoices?
Do you often miss out on early payment discounts?
Do you get hit by late payment penalties?
If yes, it’s time for you to act before it’s too late! You must optimize the end-to-end lifecycle of invoices and streamline cash flow management to ensure timely vendor payments and smooth day-to-day operations.
Automation (the right kind) is important!
To go by one of the findings, depending on an organization’s size and type, it takes an average of 7 days to process a single invoice and may go up to 17 days. The time taken to process an invoice has direct implications on the cost of operations, the productivity of the employees, and the straight-through processing ratio. These are integral key performance indexes while managing the process. Therefore, automation (the right kind) is important. Soon when you’ll begin evaluating solutions, you’ll come across two neatly divided types of vendors:
Point solution providers, who would offer you a plug and play solutions to solve for your specific business requirements.
Platform-based solution providers, who would have your end-to-end enterprise-wide requirements covered.
Out of the two, I undoubtedly prefer platform-based solution. Let’s see why:
Point Solutions: Point solution, to you, may seem to be the quick and easy fix for a business need which is, in this case, invoice processing. But, if you look at the bigger picture, invoice processing is a part of a larger function i.e. procure-to-pay (P2P). And, P2P encompasses various other functions, including purchasing, supplier management, contract management, and others. Therefore, despite being a champion in one specific area, a point solution lacks flexibility and fails to drive agility in an organization. Not only that, the change management poses difficulties and in most of cases, there’s no scope for users to make alterations – all because of the predefined features set of these business solutions.
Platform-based Solution: Platform-based solution, on the other hand, helps develop multiple applications in a low code environment using a single platform. This platform empowers organizations to automate simple department functions to complex enterprise-wide solutions. Based on the drag and drop model of the platform, your users can easily design processes based on requirements and manage business activities in a seamless manner.
Invoice management solution built on a business process management (BPM) suite comprise of configurable components like the rules engine and workflows that will help run invoicing management – your way! Leveraging BPM, you’ll have a single source of record, ensuring every invoicing transaction is tracked and audited in a timely, relevant and accurate manner. The use of multiple systems and applications, over time, results in data silos. BPM will bridge these silos by connecting your organization’s people, systems, processes, and things. There will be seamless information flow, streamlined processes, and timely communications. Contrary to getting into a chaos of maintaining operations across multiple entities, BPM will scale up easily in terms of geographic expansion or in terms of internal department inclusion. In addition, you’ll be able to leverage the integration between legacy systems and other disparate applications, without having to overhaul the entire system. There will be high visibility of data across the purchase to payment cycle and better operational control.
In short, a long-term solution is better than a short-term fix. With BPM, you’ll be able to achieve service excellence in invoice processing and minimize process cycle times to less than a day.
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