How to be a winning company at information management

The right information, via the right channel, to the right person, at the right time. That may sound obvious, but many organisations have problems creating cohesive structures in the digital world – particularly in the current climate as social networks grow ever stronger. It is therefore imperative to have efficient ECM tools. One example is AstraZeneca, which automated its invoice handling with the aid of Logica.

“We have the most complete end-to-end ECM offering in the market”
-Paul Joosten, ECM expert at Logica

Every year, AstraZeneca – the international pharmaceutical company – receives 200,000 invoices in Sweden alone. Until a few years ago, each individual invoice was processed manually.

Paper invoices were received, registered, account coded and circulated around the company to various people for approval, payment, follow-up and reconciliation – just as in most other companies.

If the process is analysed more closely, it is incredible to observe the logistics, the organisation and the time required to keep track of one single invoice in a company with thousands of employees and thousands of suppliers. And as a pharmaceutical company, the requirements for diligence are extraordinary for all forms of document handling, especially for traceability and confidentiality.

"Of course, it is not unknown for things to go wrong on occasion. Invoices are misplaced, forgotten, paid late, early or not at all," says Thomas Westerbring, System Manager at AstraZeneca. "And to prevent such events without any system support is enormously resource intensive." 

The risk of errors increases with every additional person involved in the handling and with the increasing complexity of the procedures.

How can this be solved?

"This is a classic ECM problem," says Paul Joosten, one of Logica Group's experts in the field. He has worked with ECM in different forms since the beginning of the new millennium.

Prior to examining AstraZeneca's solution, which builds on digitalisation and automation, let's take a closer look at the thinking behind ECM.

The right information at the right moment

Companies consist of information and processes. ECM, Enterprise Content Management, is a collective name for tools and processes that manage different types of content. This includes e-mail, documents (e.g. invoices), web pages, multimedia, etc.

"A key point is to ensure that the right information is available to the right person via the right channel at the right time," says Paul Joosten.

This may sound simple, but all who have worked at a large company know that it is incredibly difficult. Finding the right information at the right moment requires that the location of the information is known and that the information when found is correct and the most up-to-date version. It also presupposes that effective methods are used to capture relevant information from different channels and to structure that information so that it can be found. This forms a basis for developing processes and procedures and for enhancing the efficiency of the business.

How to gain control of information

How then does the company gain control of all relevant information?

The mailboxes of staff often contain important information. These individuals may leave the company, have an accident or even delete their inbox and, without warning, all the information is gone or in the best case, hidden in some backup server.

"It is important that companies have procedures in place to store relevant mail so that others can view them and find information by utilising such tools as search engines," says Paul Joosten.

Electronic mail to and from customers can contain information critical for contracts and is quite simply far too important a channel for the company to allow individual employees to keep all their mail separately.

Since the mailbox also usually contains an amount of private mail, the company's requirements for sharing may conflict with personal integrity. According to Paul Joosten, this is not difficult to solve. Storage can be automated to place mail with the company's name in a searchable server. It is also possible for staff to follow a routine of using drag-and-drop for relevant mail to a common database. The mails remaining are their own personal mail.

Who has control of Twitter?

Today's information society has led to an explosion in the volume of documents. Managing these quantities is one of the greatest challenges facing companies.

An increasingly important factor is taking into consideration the social networks that have grown ever stronger over the past few years, such as Facebook and Twitter. Suddenly, there are even more channels and interfaces with customers and markets that can contain information that the company wishes to save and distribute to others in the organisation.

In social networks, the grey zone between private and corporate is even broader than with e-mail, but companies can often solve this by utilising a clear policy, for example, by stipulating that customer communication via Twitter must be stored and made searchable. Other messages can be private.

"We view social networks as another area for collaboration and we offer companies solutions to enable them to also use these channels. It is about having a multichannel approach, which we encourage," says Paul Joosten.

Information disorder

Information disorder causes a company to become less efficient. Knowledge cannot be found and is not recycled. The wheel has to be reinvented time and time again. Sometimes this causes embarrassment, such as in the case of the oil company that decided to drill for oil in the north of Canada. No oil was found in the area and it was later revealed that the same company had drilled in the same area a few years earlier to no avail. This information error cost many millions of dollars.

Or the transportation company that invited tenders when creating a global freight organisation and received three different offers from different departments of the same company. The left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing. That company did not make the best impression.

ECM means that the company organises its information through utilising structured and efficient methods to capture, manage and distribute content.

Prioritised areas for Logica

Over the past ten years, ECM has grown as a concept in pace with the rapid development in digitalisation of information and the various methods of storage, distribution and publication.

ECM is prioritised at Logica. The company currently has many partners and 2,000 of its own consultants specialising in the field. The number of ECM employees is growing rapidly and all aspects from strategic analysis and pre-studies to implementation of technical solutions and design are provided.

"We have the most complete end-to-end ECM offering in the market," says Paul Joosten.

The majority of companies are digitalised via e-mail, websites, databases, etc., but often lack a cohesive structure, an ability to communicate between different systems, a suitable publication tool or search system, and so forth. There is a growing need for coordinated control of information. This is where ECM enters the frame, but standard off-the-shelf solutions rarely exist. No company is quite like another and all require special adaptations. 

"As an ECM specialist, it is important to have extensive and solid knowledge of all types of information management. It is an advantage not to be bound to one specific technical solution, but rather to be able to utilise the technology of various suppliers and partners. Only then is it possible to customise solutions to match different customers," says Paul Joosten. 

Intranets run wild

Logica has helped a global manufacturing company to boost its productivity by creating the right prerequisites to ensure that information disseminated is correct and easily accessible. One of the challenges was to clean up the company's intranet, which had run wild; local intranets had a life of their own. Logica conducted a pre-study and participated up to the implementation of the finished solution, which was an integrated communications platform based on Microsoft SharePoint.

Another case was the information solution for an international fashion and clothing group with 60,000 employees. Many new stores were planned for the years ahead and tens of thousands of new employees needed to be recruited. The solution included a global intranet portal with simple storage and publication tools, the possibility to conduct online conferences, the distribution of e-learning courses, document management, etc.

Shared information

Companies often have ECM in some form but can save a lot of money by making them more efficient, for example, companies that have straggling technical solutions for different offices and subsidiaries. Proprietary systems can mean that information is locked into isolated islands, which impedes collaboration and information sharing with the rest of the company. Sometimes, a resolute "gardener" is required in the mixed environments and IT structures that have grown up more or less on their own over the years. Such was the case for one company that decided to restructure its 250 websites as one, resulting in considerable savings.

"Much of ECM concerns change management and ensuring that people work effectively together and share information," says Paul Joosten.

Rapid handling of invoices at Astra Zeneca

What does the invoice handling of a large company like AstraZeneca have to say about ECM? An awful lot. An invoice is a piece of information to be captured, stored and distributed to the right people via the right channels at the right time. A new structure laid the foundations for automation of the processes.

Until 2005, it was paper invoices that ruled at AstraZeneca in Sweden. They were registered on arrival and passed on via the internal post.

Thomas Westerbring remembers that this required a considerable amount of manual work. Problems arose on occasion from invoices being sent to the wrong department or from staff overlooking or mislaying invoices.

AstraZeneca decided to make the transition to automation. The first step was to digitalise all invoices by scanning them in. This was carried out by an external company, which also checked if any basic information that an invoice must contain, such as VAT, addresses or similar, was missing before passing them on to AstraZeneca. The invoices are subsequently handled by the personnel who match them against purchase orders and circulate them to staff in operations, who can view the invoices through their web applications.

Personnel responsible for account coding/reviewing/approving an invoice receive a message that it is in the system. If it is not handled within a specified time period, the status of the invoice is escalated automatically and the immediate superior is notified that it requires processing.

"This ensures that payment is made on time and that we obtain an effective flow," says Thomas Westerbring.

Some invoices go directly to payment without any manual input, such as when there is a matching purchase order that is already account coded and approved.

"The system can read if it is such an order invoice. The entire process is automated," says Thomas Westerbring

By entering the information into a system and creating processes, something that was error-prone and time-consuming in the past can now be reliably processed at a much lower cost.

"This is the whole point of ECM. Enhanced control and more efficient operations," says Paul Joosten.

What does Logica know about ECM?

Logica is one of the world's largest consulting groups in this field. Over 2,000 ECM specialists help companies with information management, data capture, document and web content management, document distribution, portals and websites. Services provided include everything from strategy, pre-studies, information modelling to implementation of ASP services.

The customers are primarily large corporations, public authorities and companies that focus on integrating their information and making their processes more efficient.

Customers include the energy company Shell, the Dutch telecoms company KPN, the Swedish defence procurement agency FMV, the office cleaning group Facilicom, the supermarket chain Axfood, the beverage group Heineken, German car manufacturer Audi and BMW, the French banks Societé General, Credit Lyonnais, BNP Paribas, the UK DFID organization and Office of Fair Trading, transportation companies Airbus, Network Rail, KLM and Finnair, defence organization NATO, just to mention a few.

Definition of ECM

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions allow organizations to understand and manage all of their information assets consistently and effectively.

In practice, ECM is a set of solutions that improves an organization´s business processes and enables employees and teams to work efficiently with the contents of those processes.