Expert Opinion
ERP and ECM integration improve organization efficiency
ERP and ECM have for a long time grown separately as part of Enterprise IT. More and more companies are now looking at leveraging integration of both platforms, while being careful to keep their information governance dynamic and evolving over time. Recent business focused technologies have shown demonstrable benefits and ROI of such integrations.
Companies looking at improving operations costs and customer service are likely to launch ERP and ECM integration projects. In a recent survey from AIIM [1], of respondents found that ERP and ECM integration projects gave a much better return on investment (ROI) than other IT integration projects.
Three key areas are generally considered when considering ERP and ECM integration: linking documents and transaction data, to align document based processes such as invoice management; improving customer service, by enabling a unique customer 360° view across all ERP, CRM and ECM content and finally by enhancing knowledge access, through improved search and portal functions.
These integration efforts are usually slowed by several technological and organizational factors. The main technology issue is the cost of integration between systems that were not originally designed for integration. Organizational issues range from application ownership (ERP and ECM projects being typically managed by different teams) to metadata management to ensure consistent and permanent linking.
New strategies in ERP and ECM integration have shown a much better rate of success by tackling directly those issues, through simpler, unobtrusive integration for content enablement (such as mash-ups or REST APIs); as well as packaging good practices in software form, focusing on business oriented processes, such as invoices, HR or legal management. The key to success of these new ECM tools is to remain simple and agile, while being mindful of applications boundaries, not trying to duplicate or replace existing business processes and metadata. Proper metadata management and linking also opens the possibilities of integrating several applications working with the same object such as invoices, which can be accessed from many sources, including spreadsheets in Office applications.
Approaching ERP and ECM integration through these new strategies yields several benefits: Companies are able to better leverage existing investments in both enterprise platforms; ERP processes are more efficient as users are able to access unstructured content in context; Customer service is improved by giving customer representative an immediate and complete view of all customer information; and finally ECM repository content is greatly improved by the consistent capture of relevant ERP documents and information, enabling advanced information governance and policy management.
Content Enabling technologies enable very efficient and cost effective ERP/ECM integration projects, and will certainly be in short to medium term part of most CIO’s information governance strategies and roadmaps.
[1] Connecting ERP and ECM: Measuring the Benefits © AIIM 2010
By Ziad Wakim, VP Solutions, EVER TEAM
