Business owners and entrepreneurs have a huge array of things to manage from enterprise infrastructure to vital records. One of the mission-critical tasks for them includes records management. Record creation, handling, and retrieval are the most significant tasks involved in records management. In order to manage and use a future ready, scalable, and robust solution, you would need to check on a few crucial points.
Questions to set your Records Management Goals
• What kind of business records are enterprises aiming to store and retrieve?
• What are the challenges enterprises faces while performing records management?
• Why enterprise should shift from paper to digital today?
Finding answers to these questions will help you to define journey from ideation to completion for your business specific records management, and its significance across the digital landscape.
Understanding Records Management
As decision makers and Government CIOs are focusing on digitization and exploring digital environments for information, the growth and rise of digital content have become inevitable. While conventional business record sources such as physical documents continue to exist, its prominence is rapidly being eclipsed by electronic records and data. With this evolution, proper, precise, and unified management of physical records, tangible objects, and digital information, will emerge as a crucial necessity for every enterprise today.
Unraveling and Addressing the Pain Points
Records management is one of the critical pain points for enterprises. Depending upon their specific business requirements, they will require adopting integrated and unified solution. However, that’s not the end of the story. Business records management comes along with quite a few critical challenges.
While organizations conceptualize and incorporates distinctive records management approaches, some of the common challenges include:
I. Numerous Silos: A Majority of business organizations spread their records across multiple channels, applications, systems, and physical locations. Here, record identification, searching and accessing become highly difficult.
II. Issues involved in Policy Enforcements: In spite of presence of unified record management solutions, enterprises fail in policy implementations. Reports by Iron Mountain suggests also same that although 80% of enterprises have unified records management systems in place, only 37% of them could actually implement policies across the enterprise landscape. The remaining 43% will have to bear the brunt of non-compliance issues.
III. Cost Inefficiencies: Isolated silos consume too much of space for data storage. They use huge resources, time, and finances involved in records management. Businesses are required to cut down their legacy inventory in a defensible manner.
While enterprises are plagued by these challenges and business risks, Electronic Records Management (ERM) can turn out to be the most effective solution.
Decoding ERM and its Importance in Enterprises
According to definition provided by ISO 15489: 2001, ERM refers to the comprehensive system of creation, receipt, distribution, maintenance, disposition, as well as usage of business records. The system considers each and every business record as evidence, thus keeping a track on enterprise activities.
From medical to service-oriented sectors, ERM systems deliver optimum performance across diverse industry verticals. Some of them include:
a. Healthcare Industry: Keeping records of birth, deaths, and pathological reports such as X-rays.
b. Services Industry: ERM finds application in contract renewal or approval where it’s necessary to refer to past records.
c. Manufacturing Sector: ERM plays a highly significant role in manufacturing units by keeping transaction and purchase records.
Let’s look at some scenarios where ERM would help enterprises:
• In the year 2012 Citigroup was fined $750,000 as compensation for those numerous emails, which it failed to retain.
• If healthcare sectors and organizations fail to protect and secure the medical history of patients, they will be fined up to $1.5 million, according to the HIPAA Act.
In a nutshell, Electronic Record Management happens to be a crucial necessity for every enterprise. As loss of business records can cost millions, every enterprise today embraces ERM to save the horrors of financial risks.
ERM – Alfresco’s Module
When proper information governance emerges as the prime necessity, ‘Alfresco One Records Management Module’ offers the perfect solution. The company amalgamates control and simplicity thus ensuring unparalleled information governance.
Most importantly, this electronic records management solution seamlessly integrates into your existing enterprise infrastructure and automates the entire record management lifecycle.
Essential features and benefits of Alfresco’s ERM solutions include:
| Features | Benefits |
| Scalable Content and Records Repository | Adherence to Information Governance Policies |
| Record Compliance | Efficient Solution |
| Business Records Maintenance | Faster Search |
| Integrity of Records | Improved Business Processes |
Parting Thoughts
With DoD Certified Open Source Records Management Solution, Alfresco emerges as a pioneer in records management. You can also opt for Records Management Alfresco 2.4 that supports U.S. government’s data cleansing standards thus supporting millions of users.
Get in touch with us at CIGNEX to know how your organization can leverage the Alfresco’s Records Management to manage your records.
