Document Management

Integration is the word for DMS

Owing to the large number of public sector enterprises that are still paper based, India remains a key market for DMS solutions. Vendors integrating their DMS solutions with ERP systems and venturing into the design space have created a new wave amongst Indian enterprises. By Chirasrota Jena

Document Management Systems (DMS) have seen substantial changes during the past decade. With businesses expanding and mandatory regulations to follow, the generation of paper-based documents has also risen. With a huge amount of documentation to deal with, organisations the world-over rely on solutions to manage documents and make their offices less paper intensive. This helps them reap business benefits such as competitive advantage, increased market share, quick ROI, high efficiency and low turnaround time. 

Enterprise Content Management has become an imperative for Indian enterprises driven by the unprecedented growth in data—structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information—which is estimated to grow by 50 percent a year. Of all this information, over 80 percent is unstructured, 95 percent of which is unmanaged. There are reports, which show that employees can spend up to 40 percent of a workday looking for content and untangling issues related to versioning, ownership, and reformatting.

As a result, much expensive content goes underutilised or must be recreated. Additionally organisations are also beginning to feel the heat from various regulations such as the IT ACT, SEBI Listing Clause 49, Basel II and the SOX act. These regulations compel organisations to store and manage data for specific periods of time giving rise to content management challenges. Hence given these content management challenges, enterprises need to look at adopting well defined and well planned content management strategies in association with experts in the field.

The DMS market is emerging as a huge market opportunity. According to industry reports, it is growing at 30 percent year-on-year. According to IDC, companies with the fastest growing profits in their industry sectors are tackling document processes and achieving the concurrent benefits. Specifically, there is a positive relationship between effective document management and two factors, above-average growth of profits and an organisation’s ability to respond to changing market conditions. According to Gartner, up to three percent of the revenues of typical corporate could be spent on office output (print, copy and fax). The total cost of document management and office output could vary from 5 to 15 percent. IDC says companies spend up to 10 percent of their revenue on document production, management and distribution. According to IDC, the document solution market in the APAC region is worth $94.3 billion. The market for dynamic content software is constantly changing and evolving as new business needs emerge and new technologies develop. In recent years, organisations have taken note of the fact that efficient management of documents and content is a critical aspect of doing business. Failure to gain control of documents and content can consume a significant amount of time and money. It can also hinder an organisation’s ability to improve business processes, communicate internally and with external entities—suppliers and customers. From a base of 170 million consumers, telecom is expected to touch 500 million consumers by 2010.  Credit card growth is exponential, the health industry is getting regularised and retail is booming.  With this trend application driven mission critical document generation and outsourcing is bound to grow.  The trend so far, which is not showing any sign of slowing down, is that the overall market is projected to have a CAGR of 18.1 percent between 2003 and 2008.  

Managing documents intelligently

The major hardware players in the DMS market are Canon, Xerox, HP, Sharp and Samsung. There are also software companies, the likes of EMC, IBM and NewGen that are focusing on Enterprise Content Management, Business Process Management (BPM) and Document Management Solutions. Other software companies are focusing on the management of document for specific verticals as Solidworks is doing for the design industry.

Pankaj Ukey, Office System Product Lead, Microsoft India says, “Document management is one component of the overall framework of SharePoint Server 2007. Significant investments have been made in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, including out-of-the-box integration with Office 2007 client applications, to provide a robust productivity infrastructure for organisations that will help streamline the way people do business. There are options for Web content management, collaborative workspaces and also applications in the back end.”

Xerox is planning to tap the document management opportunity in India through Xerox Global Services. It offers services in three broad areas—Business Process Services, Xerox Office Services and Document Outsourcing and Communication Services (DOCS). Ravi Venkatraman, Director, Xerox Global Services says, “DOCS is the latest offering from Xerox that offers a full range of consulting and managed services. It aimed at optimising costs from document design and composition to production and distribution. The service line was launched in October 2006 and targets BFSI, manufacturing, retail and advertising agencies in India. Xerox Office Services is a suite of services for managing document output and infrastructure assets to help organisations deliver measurable efficiencies, reduce costs and improve productivity.”

Canon India is providing print and document management contract services.

The government and PSUs that have surplus manpower have deployed document management. Most BPOs and ITES units are opting for the holistic service.

EMC also provides a wide range of solutions that manage content across multiple departments within a single repository. P Ramsundar, Country Manager, Software Group, EMC India & SAARC says, “One of the key solutions is document management with EMC Documentum that enables customers to automate and manage documents through their complete lifecycle, from capture and creation through approval and archival.”

NewGen provide end-to-end enterprise solutions using workflow and Imaging technologies. The company has implemented its flagship DMS solution, OmniDocs, for a number of Indian and international clients across verticals.  Diwakar Nigam Chairman and CEO of Newgen Software Technologies Ltd India says, “Our comprehensive product range combined with industry-specific domain expertise and a proven track-record with large BPM and DMS deployments differentiate us from other players.” OmniDocs, the flagship product from the Newgen stable, is a multi-tiered, platform independent solution built using server-side Java and J2EE technologies. NewGen’s Document Management System works in combination with workflow management.

DMS for the design industry

From the perspective of engineering design, document management plays an important role in engineering.  In the old days, when designers created 2D engineering drawings of product designs on drafting tables, managing product design data was a fairly straightforward process of collecting, cataloguing, and safeguarding paper drawings in storage cabinets.

In many ways, the differences between using a paper document management system and working with a Windows-based product data management (PDM) system such as PDMWorks Enterprise software are analogous to locating library materials with a card catalogue versus finding the information via an online search engine.

Opines Ved Narayan, Vice President, Asia-Pacific Operations, SolidWorks, “SolidWorks 2007 includes sets of expert software tools, not simply to automate rudimentary, common functions, but to actually solve design problems like the most accomplished CAD expert would. The goal of these tools is to eliminate the need for users to learn how 3D CAD software “thinks” and to make every SolidWorks user an expert right from the start. What automatic transmission has done for novice drivers, what GPS has done for travellers, SolidWorks SWIFT is doing for 3D CAD users.” 

Designing products in the digital age demands an easy-to-use, efficient, and cost-effective product data management (PDM) solution. This PDM system not only must support the creation and control of increasing amounts of diverse types of 3D product design data, but also must foster collaboration across design teams and with external partners. An effective PDM system does more than simply fulfil the role that document management systems have played in the past. It also represents a critically important next step for maximising the productivity benefits of CAD automation across product development stages and throughout the extended enterprise.

Integrating DMS with ERP

Companies are integrating their document management solutions with Enterprise Resource Planning solutions. According to IDC output volumes in the office are increasing by 21 percent per annum, driven by changes in information availability brought about by new technologies such as ERP systems, the Internet and Intranets. Document management companies are also linking up with ERP vendors like SAP, Oracle and others. There is also a move afoot to image-enable all kinds of business applications, from accounting software to customer relationship management (CRM) systems. These days, document management is more about enterprise content management, and the industry is shifting its technology focus to address these issues. A primary function of integration is to reduce the dynamic creation of reports. As ERP systems get older and older, the databases get larger, this can slow retrieval considerably. The document management system can be the central storage and retrieval mechanism for those types of requests by integrating with the ERP system to archive completed reports. Microsoft in association with SAP has developed a solution to integrate the latter’s ERP solution with the former’s Office solutions. Ukey says, “Duet allows information workers to use their familiar Microsoft Office environment to access selected SAP business processes and data.”

Ramsundar says, “EMC software provides a single, unified platform of ERP archiving and content management services that can be deployed incrementally as a customer’s ERP requirements evolve. You can improve an ERP system’s operational efficiency and compliance and then decide later to content-enable various ERP applications.” The benefits of integration with ERP are improved compliance, performance and storage management. EMC Documentum helps content enable ERP portal applications with easy browsing, search or classification.

There is interest in capturing rich content, particularly instant messaging exchanges, as more collaboration is done outside traditional documents such as e-mail messages and Word documents. There are various document intensive transactions which require imaging capabilities, for efficient processing. While Nigam opines, “Newgen’s solution makes image enabling in ERP systems possible. It runs on SAP and uses SAP’s application server to run the applications. Some processes need to be re-designed as both imaging and workflow capabilities are needed. It has ERP connectors for integration with other ERP applications namely J D Edwards and Oracle Financials.” 

Tomorrow’s bright

Owing to the large number of public sector enterprises that are still paper based, India is and will remain a key market for DMS. Rapid globalisation and the advent of private-sector enterprises also renders the need for DMS a pressing one. Moreover, the need to comply with regulations, and to beat the competition by offering better customer service.  Deploying DMS has become essential.  In India, its users include organisations that have a large number of printers and undertake heavy document intensive work such as organisations with an extensive white collar workforce. These are primarily in the insurance, retail, banking, graphic arts and industries like aerospace, automotive, petroleum and petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and telecommunications. One of the prominent trends being observed in the document management outsourcing space is that most medium and large organisations are consistently on the look out for ways to cut costs and increase profits. However, few of these enterprises assess and manage documents.

The market is moving towards convergence of devices, security of data and ease of transference. Kishalay Ray, National Manager, Marketing, Sharp Business Systems (India) Ltd says, “This is a growing market, with converging needs of printing, scanning, copying and document storage. Shortly it will encompass anything to do with papers. Sharp has seen a growth of 20 percent, with results coming from key investments especially in corporate business as well as in the ITES and finance verticals.”

Canon India is actively looking to roll out its holistic services—enterprise output management. Opines Som Gangopadhyay, Assistant Director Marketing, BIS Group, Canon India, “Canon is tying up with paper vendors, launching a series of software and 24/7 online support for its customers. Security and compliance are driving growth in India.” The company achieved growth of 48 percent over 2005 in 2006 but it is planning to introduce more software solutions. Canon is also planning to establish a full fledged enterprise solutions team along with 24/7 support for its enterprise customers.

Xerox’s aim is to consolidate its offerings platform through a selective enterprise focus across BFSI, manufacturing, healthcare and telecom verticals.  XGS (Xerox Global Services) brings device and document management services to the marketplace. Venkatraman informs, “The group works with clients to streamline and simplify everyday processes like customer communication, billing, training and records management. Xerox is also adopting an educative approach to target the CFO community in India to increase awareness of managing documents and the financial benefits of doing so.

NewGen is looking at the ASP model to market its technology to Indian SMEs and abroad. Nigam says, “We have around a 40 percent market share in BPM and DMS space in India. Repeat customers account for about 58 percent of our business.” Even though the Indian market continues to offer opportunities for growth, NewGen plans to reach 100 countries by 2010.