Transactional Content Management: the unification of process, content, and compliance to support transactional applications

Mission-critical, transactional processes represent some of the most important activities companies undertake. Loan origination, invoice processing, claims processing, case management, new account enrollment – these processes are the bread and butter for industries such as banking, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, and government. They also are often the most costly in terms of productivity, quality, customer satisfaction, and compliance due to their manual, typically paper-based nature.

Specifically, both electronic and paper-based manual transactional processes can result in:

• Errors, low productivity, and operational bottlenecks
• Compliance, eDiscovery, and litigation risks
• Poor access to information resulting in slow response times and customer dissatisfaction
• Insecure content storage and higher storage costs

While software solutions such as business process management (BPM) and enterprise content management (ECM) have attempted to address these issues, neither technology on its own has been able to solve the whole problem. Organizations are seeking an end-to-end solution that combines these technologies, addressing the process, content, and compliance elements. The answer is a comprehensive transactional content management (TCM) solution.

Attacking transactional issues with limited success
Traditionally, companies have attempted to attack the issues inherent to transactional content through BPM or ECM solutions alone. While they are important pieces of an overall solution and help address many of the key challenges, neither technology area is able to deliver on the total value opportunity on its own.

Business process management
Many organizations have looked to BPM software for fixing rigid, inefficient processes. BPM software provides powerful capabilities for defining, automating, orchestrating, and optimizing how organizations operate, enabling improved employee productivity and enhanced coordination across functional organizations. BPM also streamlines processes, using business rules and automated, systems-based functionality to pull and post data with various data sources; assign work; set task priorities; send alerts; and trigger new actions. In addition to their human workflow and systems-based automation capabilities, BPM products also provide robust monitoring and analysis, delivering realtime process performance information, along with the ability to easily adjust and refine processes based on evolving conditions and organizational requirements.

For these reasons, BPM is in high demand as a way for improving content-related processes; however, it does not address other aspects of compliance and content management, which are vital for a majority of business applications.

Enterprise content management
While ECM attacks the other side of the TCM equation – content – its success has been limited in solving problems related to transactional processes. ECM provides the ability to manage and leverage both structured and unstructured information – both vital to the organization – but does not provide the comprehensive process lifecycle management functions such as analysis, modeling, orchestration, monitoring, and closed-loop optimization that BPM does. Instead, its process capabilities have focused on basic routing and approval functionality such as workflow.

Transactional content management: the unification of process, content, and compliance
In response to evolving market needs and technology, organizations are demanding more comprehensive approaches to address their mission-critical, business applications. These demands have driven the convergence of ECM and BPM capabilities, creating a new category of applications that require the unification of process, content, and compliance, called transactional content management. TCM provides a new level of contextual awareness and optimization to the management and orchestration of business processes. By allowing the full range of structured and unstructured information to be incorporated directly into process activities, TCM-based applications are able to create a complete view of both the action required and the information needed to make the right business decisions.

Forrester Research defines transactional content as content that “originates outside an organization from external parties – customers or partners – and relies on workflow or business process management (BPM) to drive transactional, back-office business processes. In some cases, the content not only triggers internal processes, but is the basis for the transaction itself.”

Transactional content has unique handling and management requirements because it has intrinsic value and is viewed as a key asset to the organization. It therefore must be put under full records retention control in order to adhere to corporate and regulatory compliance policies.

Transactional content management unifies two essential technologies, allowing organizations to create powerful applications that cohesively manage processes, content, and compliance.

Comprehensive TCM solutions consist of the following elements:

• Automated capture
• Orchestration of business processes
• Rapid access to information in context
• Automated retention, archive, and storage

Automated capture
The more information that can be captured and stored electronically in a single repository, the more valuable the content becomes and the easier it is to automate business processes. Incoming content comes in many forms: paper; fax; electronic forms; e-mail; XML data; computer-generated reports (COLD/ERM); and electronic documents such as Microsoft Office. Document capture solutions provide the capability to transform incoming documents into usable business data and route them to appropriate business processes. Document capture identifies document type, extracts and validates business data, and delivers the document and data to business process and content management systems.

Orchestration of business processes
Once documents have been captured in a repository, they can be put to work in automated business processes, enabling organizations to dramatically speed processing times, improve customer service, and avoid errors. Business process management automates formerly manual tasks and can include functions such as:

• Coordinating the actions of people and systems
• Applying business rules
• Integrating with line of business applications such as ERP, CRM, and Microsoft Office
• Enforcing records management and retention policies
• Merging acquired content with appropriate templates to create highly personalized communications, such as customer service letters

Rapid access to information in context
Managing business files in digital form gives employees the global, on-demand access to content that is necessary to ensure a 360-degree view of customer data and business transactions. Once documents are digitized and stored in a single repository, critical data can be easily extracted to quickly access and intelligently process a customer’s request. Employees can search, view, and annotate documents. This access delivers benefits such as collaboration for better decision making and improved customer service.

Enabling greater access delivers benefits, but access must also be controlled to protect customer confidentiality and assure the integrity of records. Integration with information rights management technology enables content to be controlled, secured, and tracked wherever it resides – both inside and outside of the firewall.

Automated retention, archive, and storage
Generally there is a point in transactional processing where the content is no longer active. At that point it can be “logically laminated” and placed under formal records management. This process can reduce your content liability by disposing of records and non-records when they no longer provide business value. In addition, the choice of an adequate storage strategy is very important because of the sheer volume and size of documents involved. An organization can realize significant savings by moving archived documents from primary, high-performance storage devices to disk-based storage devices for less frequent access.

Choosing a solution
A true TCM solution combines fully integrated ECM and BPM technologies providing the ability to model, analyze, orchestrate, monitor, and optimize transactional data and the processes they represent. Incoming and existing information is delivered directly to the systems and individuals required to process tasks, while versioning, archive, and retention policies are automatically enforced by pre-configured business rules. The most effective systems also provide for integration with other systems, using a service-oriented approach to leverage other information assets and guide process interactions with disparate systems.

Specific features to look for when choosing a TCM solution include the following:

• Rapid and distributed capture: The solution should include the ability to handle high volume input of information from a variety of sources (scanning, fax, e-Forms, e-mail, and others) and from multiple, distributed locations.
• Automated classification and indexing: A comprehensive TCM solution will include automated document classification, extraction, and validation of business information, significantly reducing the time and costs associated with manual sorting and indexing.
• Automated processing: The solution should be able to design, orchestrate, and optimize business processes that involve people, systems, content, and data.
• Process monitoring: The solution should include the ability to receive real-time process performance information through alerts, operational dashboards, and reports, both for individual process instances (i.e. work) and at the overall business performance level.
• Ad-hoc collaboration: A TCM solution should enable multiple people to work collaboratively on a process activity in a controlled environment which allows information to be shared and decisions to be recorded/captured within the context of the process.
• Inline records/retention management: Comprehensive TCM solutions enable rules-based retention and archival of information as it flows through the process, ensuring compliance with policies and regulations, and enabling fast, easy access to information as needed during or after the process has completed.
• Rapid and flexible application development framework: A comprehensive TCM solution will enable graphical configuration, implementation, and deployment of applications without the need for coding or code generation.

Improving business performance
TCM solutions can greatly improve business performance if they include the elements and features mentioned above. Specifically, these solutions provide:

• Productivity enhancements and accelerated revenue through streamlined processes
• Reduced paper costs
• Immediate and simultaneous access to all information and supporting documentation
• Stronger compliance control—enforced electronic records retention
• Enhanced customer communication management

The following examples illustrate the ability of TCM solutions to improve the performance of transaction-based businesses.

Insurance – claims processing
Processing manual, paper-based claims presents many challenges to insurance companies. For example, data must be manually entered into various systems, costing valuable time. Only one person can view a physical file at a time, causing further delays, affecting productivity, and potentially affecting customer service. Applying a TCM solution to this process enables data to be captured automatically, gives decision makers immediate access to the information, and ultimately allows claims to be processed faster.

In fact, one of the U.S.’s top twenty-five largest property and casualty insurers applied TCM to its claim entry process and saved an estimated five million dollars per year. Claim entry time was reduced from three to four weeks down to one day. The electronic claim file system can be easily accessed and updated and has resulted in faster processing of the company’s large claim files.

Contracts – Intellectual property management
Managing intellectual property manually introduces legal and regulatory risk, low productivity, high costs, and results in slower product time to market for companies such as those in the life sciences industry. Using a content management system to manage intellectual property enables improved workflow, higher productivity, and regulatory compliance, and can help get products on the market faster.

A top ten pharmaceutical firm’s Intellectual Property (IP) department implemented comprehensive transactional content management using an electronic file room (EFR). By integrating the department’s business processes with content management in order to improve access to documents, lower costs, and improve productivity, the company was able to realize a 113 percent ROI in just 18 months. 175 IP attorneys and more than 200 supporting staff located at ten sites in five countries utilize the system, resulting in estimated total benefits over three years of $17.9 million.

Why EMC Documentum for transactional content management?
Real, measurable process improvement can only result from a holistic approach. EMC® transactional content management solutions, based on fully unified, best-in-class capture, enterprise content and business process management software and record retention and storage systems, enable organizations to effectively manage both processes and information to maximize business performance. By bridging the gap of standalone BPM and ECM products, transactional content management from EMC delivers reduced complexity, ensures compliance, enables agility, and optimizes how organizations operate.

With EMC’s transactional content management solution, your company can get its work done faster—and win business away from less agile competitors. Your employees can make better decisions with an integrated view of all relevant information. Customer service will improve with better, faster, more comprehensive responses to inquiries. Your company can avoid fines and other consequences when a document can’t be located in response to a litigation or regulatory request. And you can significantly reduce costs, accelerate revenue, and increase operational efficiencies.

More information on the EMC transactional content management solution is available at www.EMC.com/tcm.