Case Management for improved process efficiency
Expert Opinion
Ziad Wakim, VP Solutions, EVER TEAM | Most companies’ business activities involve long-term relationships with clients, customers, citizens, suppliers, agencies, subscribers.... In most of these business cases, Document Management Systems have to come a long way before being seen as a solid holistic solution for the management of relationships, communications and ad hoc workflows that make up a case. Over and above, Business Process Management projects have demonstrated over the years that their “promised” return on investment is becoming an urban myth due to the complexity of the processes and the inability to manage tailored business cases pertaining to the lack of business domain expertise. |
Improving process efficiency consists mainly in optimizing the interaction between people, processes, and business applications that rely on managed content. With this on hand, organization looking at improving process efficiency would be looking more and more into Case Management.
A Case Management Application is a Composite Content Application, mixing Document Management, Business Process Management (BPM) and Publishing that enables companies to automate processes, while retaining enough flexibility for knowledgeable, human centric actions. The speed of deployment and high usability of case management technologies have dramatically improved the ROI of such content initiatives.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) maturity level enables nowadays building composite business applications that focus more on business and users requirements and less on the underlying technologies and their limitations.
Case Management is a set of software tools and strategies designed to improve efficiency and reduce costs of business processes which rely on both structured and unstructured information; requiring collective, informed decision making and process auditability.
Three key areas are generally considered with Case Management projects:
- Improving content intensive processes such as correspondence or invoicing
- Allowing better interaction between task workers and information workers
- Leveraging common enterprise knowledge
Case management provides several benefits as an alternative to other strategies such as business process management or pure collaboration, as it adapts more seamlessly to organizational changes, while enabling a thorough audit trail. Case Management is typically the right balance between control and collaboration, yielding in effect much better results than legacy approaches.
Case management frameworks enable customers to implement enterprise content management strategies on various business processes such as Claims Processing, Invoice Reconciliation, Loan Origination, New Accounts Opening, Project Management, Correspondence Management, Legal Case Management and others…. Many vendors have already focused in their Case Management offerings on specific key vertical markets.
In large, distributed environments, Case Management integration with disparate information systems becomes a must. Whether ERPs, portals, repositories or custom applications, there will always be a need to incorporate content from these third-party vendor suites, and Case Management technologies should be able to integrate with most pieces of the IT landscape.
The key criteria of a Case Management solution is the ability to be quickly configured and deployed addressing the specific business problems, shortening the project implementation cycle, and targeting ROI within a year.
Case Management Strategies enable very efficient and cost effective Business Process Management deployment and will certainly be the main driver behind Content Management Initiatives in the coming years.
By Ziad Wakim, VP Solutions, EVER TEAM
