Automate Collaborative Business Processes and Integrate With Ease

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Created on Wednesday, 14 December 2011 10:38

In addition to loan processing and underwriting, ECM has the power to automate, streamline and transform many other collaborative business processes, including:

• New account opening.
• Remittance processing.
• Exception handling.
• Expense report approval.
• Other paper-intensive procedures.

But no matter how much time, effort and investment the head office spends in planning and deploying ECM, if the filing structures or automated workflows are counterintuitive and out of sync with the needs of branch employees, they will not be put to use. According to recent research conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit on behalf of Laserfiche, 80% of the organizations that have implemented formal initiatives to improve business processes over the past three years have faced employee resistance. Three major causes of this reluctance to change were:

• The new process added more work (31%).

• Employees had little or no say in determining new process (31%).

• The new process didn't map to the way employees thought jobs should be done (28%).

By granting branch managers and department heads control over the automation of their business processes and filing methodologies, best-in-class ECM solutions enable community banks to neutralize these objections to change. The head office creates organization-wide templates and standards for managing content, and branch-level decision makers determine the best ways to work within their individual groups.

In this way, filing structures and automated workflows can readily be configured to mirror existing processes and procedures, guaranteeing swift system acceptance and enthusiastic use. Local decision makers are also able to easily make changes to their processes and filing structures midstream in order to meet changing business or market conditions, all without sacrificing the organization's control over its information infrastructure—or having to possess deep technical expertise.

Integrate With Existing Systems

Ease of use is essential when deploying ECM to branch employees, but the ease with which the system can be integrated with other businesscritical applications and imaging solutions is just as important. After all, ECM doesn't exist in a vacuum; there are many other tasks community banks must complete.

ECM built with an open architecture is designed for integration and interoperability, enabling banks to:

• Easily develop integrations with any nonproprietary software, providing information on demand, as well as document collaboration and movement capabilities.

• Integrate with core applications run on mini and mainframe computers, so any time there is a new account or an account change, updates are automatically reflected in the ECM repository.

• Automatically store reports generated by COLD applications.

• Integrate with applications that enable remote deposit capture and store check images in the ECM repository. With this capability, customers can deposit checks from their own homes or offices while banks decrease the need for paper-based deposit statements and reduce storage fees at clearinghouses.

• Access images of checks from within a customer's file, significantly speeding customer service.

The introduction of ECM software should not create logistical challenges for IT support staff. Best-in-class ECM solutions offer packaged integration tools for simple image-enabling and integrate smoothly with a wide range of other software applications, including customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, portfolio management systems and more.