FAQ's

Q: What is Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation is the operational change of an organization, industry or business through the smart integration of digital technologies, software, processes and competencies across all levels and functions in a staged and strategic way, leveraging technologies to create value, new services, improve efficiencies, drive innovation, improve customer engagement, and acquire the capabilities to rapidly adapt to changing circumstances.

Q: What is Enterprise Content Management?

Modern technology terminology can be confusing, and “enterprise content management”, despite existing for decades, remains an unclear term. Let’s define it.

Enterprise content management (or ECM) digitizes, controls, and automates the flow of unstructured information within a company.

“Unstructured information” describes the messy information that exists outside structured database environments. For example:

Structured:

• Corporate financial records inside an ERP or finance application.

• Incoming invoices, packing slips or delivery notes.

• Employee data inside a human resources planning application.

Unstructured: (examples)

• CV's, tax documents and certifications

• Customer data inside a CRM

• Emails, photographs or meeting notes

• Customer Emails and communications

Typically, ECM software handles the capture, reading and indexing of information to understand its context; provides opportunities to annotate, edit or improve the information; and offers robust workflow and automation tools to ensure that information gets to the right people at the right time.

This also includes the creation, management, processing and archiving of documents, all the way to the digital signature. Documents are available everywhere, and security and compliance are safeguarded. Even mobile users have access to all necessary data and multiple employees can access the same document in parallel. In addition, with robust logging and analytics capabilities, organizations have a record of who accessed, changed, or removed document and when.

These document management capabilities are enhanced by digital workflow automation. Digital workflow enables an organization to establish predictable, repeatable, measurable processes that remove the need for manual data entry, lost information, and constant status updates.

ECM enables communication with customers and suppliers to be digitized, modernized, and consequently improved and ensures that documents are intelligently organized, while assisting with their retrieval. In short, “enterprise content management” is a set of capabilities that enable an organization of any size to control and understand their body of corporate information.

Q: What is an ERP System?

ERP is an acronym for the term "Enterprise Resource Planning", which has become a "generic" or colloquial term that references a wide range of software platforms designed to manage and control the financial and / or operational requirements of a business.

Recently, ERP systems seem to have adopted a primary focus on digital transformation and creating a "paperless" business environment. The issue facing any business out there is which one of the "multitudes" of software platforms on the market, is the most applicable or appropriate to their needs or requirements.

Q: What is a Document Management System?

The primary value of document management software (DMS) is to process, capture, store, manage and track documents within your organization. By tightly managing your critical business information, processes start, execute and complete in a stable, predictable, measurable way.

It is almost impossible to design and implement reliable business processes and digital workflow without fully featured document management software.

The necessary components of a DMS:

Document management software has standard components to secure and manage information. The more robust platforms offer additional capabilities. These include:

Capturing and storing:

Easily OCR and intelligently index documents from a variety of sources such as email, PDFs and office documents, scanners and printers, network drives and more. Then store these indexed and usable documents in a central, secure repository.

Control access and security:

Set group, user or document-type rules to control access rights to certain information. This is essential for confidential documents such as contracts, employee records, and more. Digital document archives must prioritize security and access control.

Finding and retrieving:

OCR and intelligently index documents automatically for automated organization and simplified findability. Users can instantly access documents from any device, within or outside an office environment, to support the process at hand.

Sharing and collaborating:

Securely share documents between users with full access rights, version control, and other precautionary measures to ensure the integrity of the information. Provide editing, annotations and task management to help users make the most of the information when it’s in their hands.

Records management:

Apply retention rules, security profiles and disposition templates to ensure information is correctly stored and destroyed according to regulatory compliance.

Robust integration methods:

Securely and reliably move information between your document management software and other systems of record like CRM, HR, ERP and more. Integration can happen programmatically through APIs, through native connectors, or through basic screen mapping.

Q: What is Workflow Automation?

Workflow automation refers to automating manual tasks and business functions. An example would be when you procure stock from a supplier: An automated workflow can be established that once the Supplier invoice is received via email, the system can "read" that attached invoice and can validate:

• Is it an approved supplier?

• Has the stock been received into the system?

• The value and line items of the original purchase order to the supplier.

• If all parameters are met: The document is stored and the accounts payable sub-ledger in the financial systems is automatically updated with the value of the supplier invoice.

• If all parameters are not met: An "exception" workflow can be initiated for review.

There are many examples that can be listed, but essentially, workflow automation is the automated initiation or triggering of steps, checks or predefined actions, without the need for manual intervention.

The efficiencies that are introduced as a result, free up your people to spend quality time focused on the important areas of the business.

Q: Business Process Automation sounds like a very generic term, what are the real-world applications?

In a "real world" business environment, Business Process Automation establishes system defined digitally driven steps, processes, workflows, with checks and balances that enable a "Cradle to Grave" control and tracking, for all your operational business functions and most importantly, within a paperless environment!

As an example, a correctly installed and setup system will provide you with the following paperless workflow automation functionality:

• Lead to quote, to acceptance, to stock procurement and receipt, to installation scheduling, to job card creation, to assignment to the tech, to progress tracking, to installation completion, to customer sign-off, to raising of the invoice, to comprehensive tracking of warranties, scheduled maintenance, monitoring of SLA's, all while the client is receiving automated communications, exception reports and verifications are generated, all interactions are automatically logged in the system and a full audit trail is available.

In other words, if you do not have an integrated business and / or financial system(s) in place, working for your business and which can provide you with “fingertip” information to any of the following questions, then you need to speak to us:

• What was quoted, by whom, to whom and when?

• Has the quote been accepted?

• Has the client signed the contract?

• Is client information or documentation secure?

• Do we have stock? Should we order stock and from which supplier?

• Where is our Equipment?

• Is the equipment still under guarantee?

• Has the job been assigned?

• Is the work completed?

• Why is our WIP value so high?

• Has the client been invoiced? Has the client paid?

• What is our profit? What is our direct cost of sales?

• Why are our expenses so high? Where can we save on costs? How much commission must we pay?

• Have we met our SLA requirements with the client? When is scheduled maintenance due?

• Why does our Month End take 2 weeks to complete……?

Q: What are the Professional Services that you mention?

It often occurs that a business already has systems in place, but these are either ineffective, or are not being fully utilised. We can help you by evaluating the situation and the business, creating a business planning roadmap that could incorporate recommendations, analytics, focus areas, action steps and turn-around strategies, all of which are based on tried and tested strategies and a wealth of "real world" experience in turning businesses around.

We also offer project management services, which means that if your business is embarking on a project that involves implementing a new system, platform, or process, we can manage that entire project on your behalf. If there are multiple projects at stake, we then apply our programme management skills to ensure that all the projects are completed towards the successful attainment of the primary objective.

Through vetted and trusted service providers, we are also able to provide additional managed services such as bespoke application development services, tackle the integration of multiple stand-alone systems, data analytics and predictive modelling (e.g., seasonal trends and the future impact on the business), identify required and business applicable KPI's and create the metrics to measure and produce reports on whether these KPI's are being achieved or not.

The professional services that have elicited the highest demand are our business support and strategic planning services. These range from creating short, medium and long term Business Development plans, SWOT analysis, developing Value Innovation strategies, Competitor research, Market analytics and finding creative solutions to business specific challenges.

Many times, businesses do not have appropriately skilled people or cannot afford to hire appropriately skilled people, for a specific project or business need. It's far more cost effective to on-board a company such as ours to create, manage, monitor, train and hand-over, than to attempt to hire or grow these skillsets organically, especially if the situation is "time sensitive".

Q: We have tried this before and it failed, how will using your company be any different ?

Great question and we are glad that you asked!

Many implementations of new systems fail and / or have substantial cost overruns because of the following main reasons:

The wrong system was specified or chosen.

• System X was selected because the salesman of System X had the best pitch or created the best deal to sell the product that they represent, and not because it was best for your business.

Resistance to change and a lack of understanding of the change management requirements.

• How will MY job be affected? Am I going to be replaced? I don’t like change!

The client simply does not have the time or resources to fully commit to the project.

• In almost every project, the client-side human resource assigned to manage such a project or portions thereof, must usually take on this additional work, in addition to their existing daily functions.

• The inevitable outcome is that these project crucial functions are perceived as a burden and deprioritised or postponed in favour of “my actual work that I have to do”.

Lack of internal communication and stakeholder engagement.

We do not have a "primary" system that we propose but rather a toolbox of solutions that we can access to find or curate the best system for your business.

We ensure that the above-mentioned challenges risks are mitigated by acting on your behalf, protecting your interests and depending on the options that you select, we can manage the project implementation from inception to go-live and beyond for you, while freeing up your people to do what they do best.

THINK OF US AS YOUR BUSINESS PARTNER, COACH, MENTOR, OPERATIONS MANAGER AND PROJECT MANAGER, ALL IN ONE. YOU DO WHAT YOU DO BEST – RUN YOUR BUSINESS AND LET US TAKE CARE OF THE REST.

Q: What are the costs?

The very nature of what we do makes it impossible to provide a price list or cost structure because there are so many potential variables. For this reason, it's always best to receive a proposal from us.

The initial consultative process is always free and once we understand the factors that are driving the need for change, we can formulate a solution to address and mitigate those factors, thereby starting you on the journey to unlocking your full potential!

Q: What else does Considered Solutions offer?

Through our partnerships with vetted and trusted service providers, we are able to offer a vast range of options and packages that relate to: Internet | Data | Cloud and Hosting Solutions | IT, Networking and Managed IT Solutions | ICT (Voice, VOIP and Telecoms) | Office 365 services, licenses and application training

Q: I might be interested, what do I do now?

Start the journey by contacting us, let's have a chat and see what we can do for you.

Q: Have any other questions?

Feel free to contact us and chat about your questions or requirements, we would love to hear from you