We’ve been confronted recently with new and unusual challenges – both personally and at work. Many organizations already have the option of remote work in place and running, which pays off particularly right now. But how well is your organization equipped to facilitate work at home while also supporting and collaborating with colleagues, customers, partners and suppliers? Can you still guarantee continuity in business operations, relations and service? While the gaps in your digital transformation might have become even more evident recently, it’s no time to discourage. Now is the time to take the insights and lessons learned and put them towards formulating a game plan to prioritize and solve challenges not just for the next unprecedented situation, but also for business continuity now and down the road.

While there may be external factors (e.g. market demand, product availability) impacting business right now that you can’t control – let’s focus instead on the things we can change or influence!

One core aspect of business continuity is digital readiness. The shift to remote work requires digital readiness on several levels. The infrastructure – in terms of secure access to business-relevant information via VPN or similar or by supplying laptops to the all(!) employees – is indisputably one crucial factor.

In addition to assessing your technical set-up, we strongly recommend reviewing your collaboration and content requirements and identifying possible gaps. Beyond covering your employees’ needs while working remotely, organizations should consider their strategies for ensuring overall business continuity for themselves, partners and customers. Here are some questions to consider:

• Where is content, i.e. documents, notes, files, contracts, etc. stored? Across multiple repositories? In data silos? Department applications?
• Do all employees have access to the content and information they need to complete tasks, provide customers and partners answers, and make sound business decisions?
• Are employees able to keep working in processes and ensure that workflows run seamlessly? Do they have access to documents and data related to specific processes – without having to leave their familiar work environment?
• How is your organization set up to provide service, support and collaborate with people outside of your organization, such as partners, customers, appraisers, legal counsel, suppliers, etc.?
• What about the security of your information sharing on a remote work basis? Are you able to remain accountable to your customers and partners on security issues?
• Data protection regulations, such as the EU GDPR, and records management policies are still in effect, even when working outside of the office. Can you ensure that your employees still work compliantly in remote work situations?

In a best-case scenario, your employees, customers, suppliers and external partners don’t even notice a difference, because your strategy has anticipated this scenario. If not, then use this situation as an opportunity to review your content and collaboration approach, starting with the questions above. Maybe this unique situation has highlighted areas of improvement you would have never been cognizant of otherwise. This may include small things that can be fixed easily, but it may also bring up more significant topics that require a deeper approach.

SER has been staying in particularly close contact with customers right now to ensure that any new challenges are solved immediately. In a recent conversation with one customer from the banking sector, he summed up positively the advantages of the document management functionalities of Doxis ECM to facilitate remote work for hundreds of users on such short notice:

“From our point of view, mobile working (or home office, etc.) is no longer conceivable without a good document management system... A pure collaboration solution no longer suffices for many legal or regulatory reasons.

If you don’t already have an audit-proof and integrated email or document archiving system, it’s better to start there and work your way forward in digitalization.”

Customers like this are an excellent example of why it pays off to invest in digital transformation – in this case, as the customer recommends, starting with first-generation capabilities such as document management, digital content capture/processing, and archiving. Thanks to its own ECM, the bank is able to respond to the new challenges of suddenly having to make remote work possible for an entire company. Employees don’t just need a collaboration tool, but also full document management and electronic archiving capabilities at their fingertips to ensure their own customers have continuous service and support.

A well-planned content and collaboration strategy is the magic formula for business continuity these days. If properly formulated, however, there isn’t much magic to it. To empower your employees, your strategy should focus on making sure they have access to all relevant content and processes – anytime and from any location – not only in challenging times. This is the foundation for them to continue providing service and support to customers, suppliers and partners, even when working remotely.

On top of that, a powerful, secure and compliant collaboration solution based on ECM leverages the full potential of working remotely for all employees and with partners, suppliers and customers. Here, all participants collaborate on one platform with the same basis of up-to-date information and the latest status. Embedded into an enterprise content management platform, content, processes and collaboration go hand in hand and the business operations don’t miss a beat. Case in point: the entire contract lifecycle – the tasks, approvals, signatures, changes – continues to be implemented with the help of deadline reminders, annotations, chats, etc. The same applies to your accounts payable processes, HR management, customer complaint handling processes, supplier management, etc. No one is left out of a process, tasks are completed, everyone has the information they need and your organization can deliver the consistent quality your customers expect.

If the current situation demands short or mid-term actions to resolve new and urgent challenges, you probably don’t have the internal capacities or even the available capital to look into comprehensive, larger-scale solutions. That’s something to consider when the waters have calmed. There are, however, so-called solution templates and applications available that can be up and running in no time to meet dynamically emerging needs.

Many of these solution templates can be customized to your requirements and are ready to support your individual use cases, such as departmental solutions for e.g. HR, legal or procurement, or tailored solutions for specific industries. What’s more, there are also solutions templates for collaboration scenarios (e.g. project rooms, supplier portals, secure deal rooms, etc.) and horizontal solutions (e.g. invoice processes, contract management, etc.). An important factor is also integration. Solution templates should easily integrate with your business applications, such as ERP, Office 365, etc.

Solution templates are developed based on a no and low-code approach, which makes it easy for you to adapt and extend your solution to changing business requirements or scenarios that may arise. SER’s own solution templates provide the quality, service and security that our customers are accustomed to no matter the solution or deployment option.

The digital transformation journey can take many paths and forms. Needs change, as organizations are experiencing now more than ever. That’s why it’s so crucial to have a choice of deployment options. A flexible subscription model (SaaS) based on the cloud, for example, enables you to optimize business processes with completely transparent operation costs, it provides high availability, and it is completely adaptable to ensure business agility.

With a content and collaboration strategy – small or big – on the way, you have already taken the first crucial steps towards ensuring uninterrupted daily business – not just for the next challenging period, but also for your organization’s overall future performance. The next time you face a challenge like large-scale remote work or any other obstacles in your company’s path, you’ve got it covered. Digital transformation is no longer a catch phrase; it’s your everyday reality.

Contact us today to find out how enterprise content management with Doxis can help your organization to be digitally ready for what’s next. Our business is running as usual – only remotely – and we are ready to talk to you via video conference or phone call. We are also prepared to do live demos remotely. Moreover, our professional services team is trained to perform project implementations remotely in collaboration with customers. We look forward to supporting your business continuity!