There’s no shortage of document management solutions on the market. And there’s no shortage of organizations that can benefit from those solutions either. But what do customers expect from a document management solution and how is that changing? Observations from three dealers and five document management solutions providers offer answers.
Tony Stamps, director of business development with Protected Trust, formerly DocuLex, feels that customer expectations remain consistent with what expectations have been over the past few years. “They’re looking for more automation in terms of indexing and tagging their documents and a seamless solution that will help them reduce the amount of indexing they have to do today.”
Tony Stamps
Protected Trust
There’s also a continued interest for line-of-business integration as well as concerns regarding how the document management solution can help them handle their workflow. “Of course most customers don’t understand what they don’t understand about workflow,” acknowledges Stamps. “They ask, ‘Do you have workflow?’ Of course the answer is, ‘Yes.’ Then the question becomes, ‘What kind of workflow are you looking for? Is it an automated rules-based workflow or is it a manual delivery system or workflow application?’.
As customer expectations evolve, so do document management product offerings and Protected Trust will soon be releasing Version 5 later this year. “It will be browser agnostic and will have more of a 2007/2010 Windows look and feel,” says Stamps.
Andrew Ritschel, president of Electronic Office Systems in Fairfield, NJ, has found that customer expectations are across the board. “I’ve had prospects/clients interested in acquiring a document/content management system that did not have a concrete understanding of what they should do or could do implementing it in their businesses. And I’ve had prospects and clients know exactly what they wanted to use it for and how to get it done. Most people are the former.”
Delving deeper into customer expectations, Ritschel has found a common need and a common request of customers currently using a document management solution is script writing.
“Vendors such as Square 9 (SmartSearch) have created powerful, scalable software modules,” adds Ritschel. “With all of the variables contributing to what should be sold, I find that unless you are selling packages and working in this space every day, you are falling behind the technology curve. We have reached the point where we now do online demonstrations via our supplier who follows up with the online and phone call qualifying, followed by proposal generation. We then do the closing while our software manufacturer handles the delivery, installation, and training.”
Scott Worroll, marketing manager with Square9 Softworks, is seeing more folks interested in going beyond the initial stage of scan, store, retrieve. “When the document management trend first started that’s what they were looking at,” he says. “Now more people are looking for ways to automate their workflows. Document workflow is a big piece of what we’re selling.”
Besides workflow, Square9’s customers are also looking for line-of-business integration. “They’re looking for that direct integration between our SmartSearch product, for example, and other products like Salesforce and Quickbooks so they don’t have to be flipping back and forth between different programs and can access everything in one location,” notes Worroll.
Andrew Ritschel
Electronic Office Systems
He’s also found that customers are more knowledgeable about document management. “People have been doing their homework before they contact us and using industry terminology,” reports Worroll. “I see them spending an enormous amount of time on our Website watching videos, downloading the data sheets, really reading through the content before reaching out to us. They’re more knowledgeable than they were two or three years ago.”
Meanwhile, over at DocuWare recent customer surveys yield some interesting results. For instance, customers actively seeking a document management solution are looking for a solution to eliminate the time-consuming process of hunting for documents. Overall, however, expectations are simple.
“Expectations were based on the premise that there must be a better way to improve their processes and handle their documents,” notes Thomas Schneck, president for DocuWare. “We also see a lot of motivation from the C-level people who want to relieve employees from this burden.”
DocuWare customers are also looking for a solution that allows them to focus on their core competencies, which leads to payoffs such as enhanced customer service, better accounts payable processes, and increased cash flow. “Nobody gets hired to shuffle paper and people realize that,” adds Schneck. “If they can remove that task from people they can then focus on their core business and their core competencies at the individual level. That’s what people understand.”
Overall, Schneck sees expectations evolving, but the initial expectations still center around dealing with the basics first, then expanding into workflow, integration with their ERP, and connecting it to mobile applications. But by and large, document management providers have some explaining to do.
Scott Worroll
Square9
Meanwhile, over at DocuWare recent customer surveys yield some interesting results. For instance, customers actively seeking a document management solution are looking for a solution to eliminate the time-consuming process of hunting for documents. Overall, however, expectations are simple.
“Expectations were based on the premise that there must be a better way to improve their processes and handle their documents,” notes Thomas Schneck, president for DocuWare. “We also see a lot of motivation from the C-level people who want to relieve employees from this burden.”
DocuWare customers are also looking for a solution that allows them to focus on their core competencies, which leads to payoffs such as enhanced customer service, better accounts payable processes, and increased cash flow. “Nobody gets hired to shuffle paper and people realize that,” adds Schneck. “If they can remove that task from people they can then focus on their core business and their core competencies at the individual level. That’s what people understand.”
Overall, Schneck sees expectations evolving, but the initial expectations still center around dealing with the basics first, then expanding into workflow, integration with their ERP, and connecting it to mobile applications. But by and large, document management providers have some explaining to do.
Thomas Schneck
Docuwar
“We discussed that with them in the past, but they didn’t really want it, now they do,” adds Marsh.
Many RJ Young customers are also looking for a solution that will help them adhere to compliance standards, such as HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley as well as ease of use and ease of administration.
As far as whether or not customer expectations are realistic, RJ Young’s customers tend to fall into two camps, either very realistic or very unrealistic. “There aren’t many in the middle,” says Marsh.
Those with realistic expectations obviously want a simple process and for RJ Young to take charge, which usually involves setting the expectations and working with the customer to make sure the implementation goes well. For those he deems very unrealistic, it’s primarily because they don’t understand what it takes to implement and administer a document management system.
Either way, RJ Young has found they can handle either customer’s expectations.
“We’re not being beholden to one system and have multiple document management solutions and are able to speak to that point effectively. From a document management standpoint that is probably one of the biggest hurdles to overcome—identifying your customer and all the people involved and setting the expectations realistically on the front end,” emphasizes Marsh.
Catherine Ramos, product manager and director of vertical marketing operations for Laserfiche, has found that customers want a document management system that’s quick to deploy and configurable. As others have noted, they also expect their document data to be integrated with their line-of-business applications.
Tom Davis
Fraser-ais
“The document management system needs to be built on an open architecture, straightforward to integrate, and needs a point and click interface for integration,” notes Ramos. “When I say integrate, I’m not only talking about a SDK that’s well documented, but more of this point-and- click interface where they can push and pull information between databases. Integration is things that can be deployed in hours or days, not weeks of custom coding and creating customer applications.”
Laserfiche customers are also looking for pre-wrapped Web components that they can merge with their outward facing portals so that it looks similar to the rest of their site.
Storage and retrieval remains a common need. “We’re always going to have that need for storage and retrieval, but Laserfiche customers are using document management to automate business processes like contract management, accounts payable, and HR on-boarding,” explains Ramos.
Ramos sees the consumerism of IT as a driving force behind these trends and others. “It’s definitely driving the way IT is deploying their document management systems. People internally and externally have these expectations of how it interacts with technology. They’re coming to work with their tablets and smart phones and they use these apps every day and expect a seamless instant gratification and to receive information quickly.”
For example, financial planners want 24-hour access to their records over the Web, and beyond that they want to access it on their mobile phone. “Being able to provide this content in a format that is consumable is a lot of what’s driving these expectations and changes,” notes Ramos.
Matt Marsh
RJ Young
When it comes down to customer expectations, what Bruce Malyon, president of MaxxVault is seeing is that everybody wants instant gratification. “They want a tool that has instant information capture and access, they want a software solution that is plugged in at their desktop, mobile devices, e-mail application or line of business applications,” reports Malyon.
“That’s where the market is headed. Any MFP company can scan to a network folder and any document management company can work with a copier or scanner and get it into the system.”
Because those applications are only part of a document management solution, Malyon says that ‘document management’ is a term that MaxxVault is using less and less. “It’s ‘information management’ or ‘enterprise information capture’ because that’s really what we’re doing.”
A perfect example is a large MaxxVault client with more than 2,000 users. Here, it’s less about traditional routing workflows and more about interfacing with their large business applications and capturing information rather than scanning and storing documents.
Catherine Ramos
Laserfiche
“That’s where we see the industry going,” states Malyon. “They want tight integration with the tools that they’re using on a daily basis and it has to be simple to use.”
One of the things that MaxxVault has is the ability to take any MFP that scans to an IP address and have that go directly to the cloud or from a tablet to the cloud. “They want ease of use,” states Malyon. “It’s great that we have a full-featured Web client; but again, they’re not worried about that, they want to access their information through line-of-business applications or mobile devices.”
Malyon acknowledges that every document management solution at its core has the fundamentals—scan, index, search, and security markups. “We want to be their enterprise capture system, their enterprise workflow system. That’s where everybody is headed. Everybody pitching scan, store, retrieve is dead; you might as well be pitching a $1,000 product because there’s tons of products out there that are $1,000 or $2,000 that do that.”
While expectations and the perception of document management are changing among end users, it’s also changing on the reseller side, or at least it should, according to Malyon. He recommends that dealers embrace the concept of ‘information management’ when marketing these products. “Any dealer that embraces the fact that document management encompasses more than scanning is going to do a lot better than a traditional dealer who just focuses on ‘I need to scan and store it somewhere.’”
Bruce Malyon
MaxxVault
