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Content management solutions serve the enterprise, the supplier and the customer |
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Harness company knowledge
Content management solutions serve the enterprise, the supplier, and the customer
By Malcolm Wheatley
Artesyn Technologies is good at designing power conversion equipment. Only recently, however, did the Boca Raton, Fla.-based engineering company master the art of managing the documentation associated with its designs.
"We were losing too many documents, making too many mistakes, and taking too long to find the information we needed," says Robert Magina, document control director, who adds it wasn't difficult to identify the source of the problem.
Electronic documents—such as drawings, product specifications, and test procedures—were scattered across 13 sites, each with its own document repository, directory structure, and naming conventions. The situation was so bad that engineers routinely printed copies of electronic documents and sent them via overnight courier to colleagues at other sites. And all this was happening while a content management system (CMS)—which had been purchased to attack this specific problem—was sitting on a shelf, unopened.
Finally, Magina teamed with Brett Ostram, a programmer at the company's Eden Prairie, Minn.-based office, to tailor the CMS to Artesyn's needs. Today, any document an Artesyn employee creates—with any software package—is converted to PDF format and published on the corporate intranet.
"People can read the documents they need without accessing the application that originally produced them," says Magina. As a result, productivity has soared while costs have come down.
Information integration
Artesyn's new document management process is powered by Universal Content Management software from Stellant, one of a growing number of solutions that companies are finding valuable as new business processes force them to produce and maintain more documentation.
Companies are using these applications for everything from archiving ad hoc information that can't be stored in a transaction system, to enforcing government requirements to keep certain records in a particular format. Some companies even instruct people with expert knowledge about certain business processes to put information into a CMS so other employees can readily access it.
"We also see a lot of people bringing together information from disparate systems resulting from mergers and acquisitions," says David Thorpe, director of business strategy at Vignette, another content management supplier. "It's an opportunity to integrate and consolidate data from multiple platforms onto a single system."
In a January 2005 report titled Introducing the Active Knowledge Framework: Putting Knowledge Management to Work, Jim Murphy, senior analyst with Boston-based AMR Research, says content management solutions should be deployed as part of an overarching knowledge management strategy.
Having such a strategy in place, Murphy writes, will prevent critical information—"whether it's familiarity with plant equipment, experience with company IT systems, or relationships with key customers—from walking out the door when employees leave."
David Macey, a VP for Stellant, refers to Artesyn's use of his company's application as "PDM-lite," because Artesyn is sharing product-related data that was created in many different systems through a single portal. "It's about taking drawings and documentation from a PDM [product data management] system and making them widely available without incurring the massive cost of additional PDM licenses," Macey says.
Artesyn actually deployed the Stellant system as a PDM tool, but has since evolved it into an enterprisewide knowledge management solution. Magina says scaling the system across the enterprise took a little more work than it might have if Artesyn had recognized the system's full potential at the outset, but he is more than satisfied with how the system now works.
"We were a bit too focused on managing engineering information [in the initial deployment]," Magina says. "So we had to go back and make some aspects of the system less engineering-specific."
Now the system easily manages customer contracts, job descriptions, HR forms, employee newsletters, and just about any other document Artesyn produces. "We are pretty much using it across the business," Magina says, "even though we didn't initially recognize its potential as an enterprisewide system."
The ROI is real
Brose Fahrzeugteile, a German engineering company, installed a content management system from Mobius in 2003, and has since created a single enterprisewide document archive that is accessible to more than 2,200 SAP users worldwide. The main benefits, according to IT Manager Stefan Fröba, have been improved employee productivity and faster decision-making. He also says the system paid for itself in eight months "based solely on the savings related to printing and distributing paper-based information."
Paul Orr, IT director at Diemolding Corp., Canastota, N.Y., knows that the eSynergy content management system from Exact Software has generated a substantial ROI, even though he has never taken time to calculate it.
Diemolding makes pistons, pulleys, and other parts for the automotive industry. It uses its CMS for PDM-type functions such as engineering change control.
"If I had to quantify the ROI, I probably could today," Orr says. "But going into the implementation, we simply had no idea how many hours were previously wasted finding the right information in filing cabinets, spreadsheets, and Word documents."
As far back as 1993, says Orr, Diemolding had a vision of some sort of electronic archive to supplement the information in the company's material requirements planning and other systems. "We're talking about product-specific wear characteristics, or usage information—knowledge that is useful to store and share, but that conventional systems themselves don't accommodate," he says.
Today, as Word documents and other files from all over the business are "published" to the e-Synergy archive, e-Synergy categorizes them and tags them as belonging with other documents for cross-referencing. It's a feature that has obvious uses in terms of information retrieval, says Orr, but is even more useful in the context of change control.
"I know that if I change one particular document, all of the appropriate related documents also will be changed," he says. "Previously, we had to go and read them to figure out if they were changed."
Supply chain collaboration
Webasto Roof Systems, Rochester Hills, Mich., has taken content management beyond its own enterprise. This automotive industry supplier uses a content management system from RedDot Solutions to distribute report cards to the 250 companies from which it purchases production materials.
For years, Webasto had mailed its suppliers hard copies of information, grading their performance. But as Chris Tiffany, a Webasto key account manager, explains, "As a GM [General Motors] supplier, we used the GM suppliers' portal, so we knew there had to be a better way of communicating with our suppliers."
Tiffany says Webasto's supplier report-card solution is a work-in-progress, but already is a huge step forward from mailing printed documents. The process begins each evening when a business intelligence application from Cognos pulls sets of data from Webasto's ERP system and uses it to calculate performance ratings on areas such as on-time delivery and product quality for individual suppliers.
PDF files containing these scorecards are then generated and transmitted overnight to Germany, where RedDot—which is hosting the CMS for Webasto—publishes the system on the supplier portal. Suppliers then log on to the portal to get the most recent grades on their performance.
Corus, a London-based steel and aluminum parts manufacturer, has turned its content management application into a customer service tool. Corus installed the system, purchased from Vignette, in September 2004. The initial goal was to deliver consistent product-related and corporate information across customer-facing Web sites—formerly numbering more than 80, but now consolidated to 12.
Vignette's Thorpe says Corus is practicing "classic content management: publishing corporate information to diverse audiences, while ensuring consistency and ease of maintenance."
Maria Harris, Corus' new media manager, says employees can quickly create, reuse, and deploy content across multiple Web sites, and in various languages—all essential features for a company with manufacturing plants in five European countries and customers around the globe. Customers also can easily access information directly relevant to their needs.
"Product catalogs are based on a customer's industry sector, and not on—for example—types of steel," Harris explains. "For automotive customers, we can present product details by the parts of an automobile that they are used for, rather than the grade of steel involved." Even better, she adds, with the content management application handling the complexity of locating and presenting the information, there is no longer a need for a Webmaster to be involved in content creation and deployment.
David Guaranaccia, director of technology at RedDot, says features like personalization can be controlled through a content management application's login feature, and can be extremely valuable in simplifying new business processes.
"We call it 'marrying content with applications'," says Guaranaccia. "It's all about using the login process to not only recognize an authorized user, but offer them content and applications that reflect their needs and status. With a single sign-on process, you can deliver widely differentiated password-protected content based on the user's job function."
Google-style search
An inventory management system, for example, could be augmented to offer manuals and documentation associated with inventoried parts. By adding content to an otherwise "content-less" application, stresses Guaranaccia, you are adding value—and often at a relatively low cost. "It tends to increase customer loyalty, because at a stroke the 'cost to switch' becomes higher," he says. "You're giving them value that they can't readily get elsewhere."
Prabhakar Raghavan, CTO of Verity, says his company's solutions—which he calls intelligent content services—are augmented by search capabilities that competing systems don't have. Raghavan contends the search capabilities are essential for wringing full value from a CMS, because most companies have information spread across numerous systems and they have to locate it all before it can be managed.
Typically, Raghavan says, even after installing a content management system, a company will only have a handle on 20 percent of the information contained in all of its systems. But by adding Verity's "Google-style" search capabilities, he says, a greater percentage of that information can be located, accessed, and managed—even if it doesn't reside in the content management repository.
Raghavan says the value of Verity's search capability has been proven out by agreements other vendors—including Stellant, FileNet, Interwoven, and Documentum—have signed to license the technology.
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