Going To the Cloud for ECM? Prioritize Benchmarking First!
Optimize your ECM and RPA systems with strategic benchmarking. Here’s how.
Unlock the potential of your ECM (Enterprise Content Management) and RPA (Robotic Process Automation) systems! Brian DeWyer from Reveille Software provides insights on strategic benchmarking for effective content collaboration and AI-driven transformations.
Change is the only constant when it comes to IT applications. Specifically for Enterprise Content Management, also known as Content Services Platforms (CSP) and Robotic Process Automation, proper knowledge is necessary before inevitable change. As organizations grow and evolve, evaluating the service levels, performance, and baselines of their ECM and RPA systems becomes essential. This evaluation is where benchmarking comes into play.
Benchmarking for ECM and RPA is evaluating and comparing an organization’s system’s performance, efficiency, and effectiveness against established standards, best practices, or competitors. It leads to informed decisions and mitigates the risk of “breaking something” when a change occurs. Whether your organization is planning for ECM changes that include capacity, upgrades, new implementations, or cloud migrations, it is vital to have access to ECM and RPA metrics with context such as:
- User Levels
- Capture Processing Levels
- Repository Activity
- Transaction Performance Levels
- Database Activity
- Application Server Activity
- Workflow Processing Volumes
- Transformation Processing Volumes
- ECM Platform Service Levels
- RPA Platform Service Levels
- Application Integration Service Levels
Benchmarking Before Adding Capacity
As organizations experience growth, evaluating their existing ECM or RPA infrastructure’s performance becomes necessary before investing in additional capacity. Recognizing your ECM or RPA system is at capacity early is crucial to avoid system failures, data loss, and disruptions to the organization’s operations. The clear signs that the ECM and RPA infrastructure may be reaching capacity are the following:
- Slow Performance
- Frequent Downtime
- Difficulty Scaling
- Storage Space Depletion
- Prolonged Backup Times
- Decrease in Functionality
- Extended Document Driven Processing Times
- Increasing Production Support Issues
- Increasing User Generated Incidents
The most notable indication that the infrastructure is reaching its capacity is user frustration. Elevated user complaints due to slow performance or frequent system errors show the infrastructure can no longer meet current demands.
Benchmarking allows businesses to assess the current state of their ECM and RPA platforms, identify bottlenecks, and determine the specific areas that require improvement. By conducting benchmark tests, organizations gain insights into the system’s limitations, allowing them to make informed decisions on the appropriate capacity enhancements needed to meet their growing demands.
See More: It’s Time to Rethink Enterprise Content Management to Meet the Needs of the ‘New Normal’
Benchmarking for Upgrades
Upgrading an ECM and RPA platform is critical, as it involves introducing new features, improving functionality, and enhancing overall performance. Benchmarking during the upgrade process provides a baseline to measure the changes’ effectiveness. By comparing benchmark results before and after the upgrade, organizations can evaluate the impact of the changes on system performance, identify potential issues, and ensure that the upgrade meets their performance expectations.
Benchmarking also helps validate the upgrade’s Return On Investment (ROI) by quantifying the improvements achieved. It’s important to note that specific ROI depends on several factors, such as the extent of the upgrades. However, several apparent ROI indicators include a storage cost reduction, improved retrieval and workflow automation, less staff time on production support, faster application delivery, and the ability to scale without additional infrastructure purchases.
Benchmarking for New Implementations
When implementing a new ECM or RPA system, benchmarking is essential to establish performance expectations and ensure that the system meets the organization’s requirements. By simulating real-world scenarios and workloads, benchmarking helps determine whether the new ECM or RPA system can effectively handle the anticipated user demands and workload volumes. It allows organizations to fine-tune the system configuration, identify performance gaps, and make necessary adjustments before going live.
Benchmarking also aids in selecting the most suitable ECM or RPA solution by comparing the performance of different vendors or configurations, such as on-premises, cloud-based, and mobile applications. In addition, integration capabilities with other enterprise systems must be considered, e.g., Incident Management, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and human resource systems.
Organizations must conduct pilot testing with reportable benchmarks before implementing new ECM and RPA. These proof-of-concept projects with confirmed results will allow all stakeholders to gauge how well their “shortlisted” ECM and RPA solutions align with the company’s requirements before committing to the implementation and experiencing user frustration and infrastructure shortcomings.
Benchmarking for Migrations
Migrating from one ECM or RPA system to another can be complex and resource-intensive. Benchmarking plays a pivotal role in ensuring a smooth and successful migration. By benchmarking the existing system, organizations can establish a performance baseline. This benchmark becomes a reference point during and after the migration to compare the performance of the new ECM or RPA system. Through benchmarking, organizations can validate that the migrated data and processes perform at least as well as or better than the previous system, avoiding any degradation in performance or functionality.
What To Do Next?
Benchmarking is extremely valuable for organizations to get the most from ECM or RPA, especially with beneficial change. The question becomes, how do you benchmark effectively with minimal resource and system overhead? Organizations need access to vital benchmarking metrics; if not, the data-gathering steps become ineffective, time-consuming, and difficult to deliver suspect information.
As the Association for Information Management (AIIM) noted, most organizations have more than four different ECM and RPA platforms, thus complicating the benchmarking process. According to AIIM, 80 percent of IT professionals consider their ECM and RPA applications as critical as their transactional systems. Given AIIM’s information, organizations must ensure the best customer experience for business-critical applications dependent on these ECM and RPA platforms.
In addition, ECM and RPA platforms are vital players in intelligent automation and strategic initiatives tied to Digital Transformation (DTX) projects. These DTX projects aim to improve the customer experience and deliver new revenue sources. Benchmarking is a crucial component to help verify ECM and RPA platforms are meeting the DTX investment objectives.
To sum up, benchmarking is a must to make sound ECM and RPA management decisions!
What challenges have you faced in ECM and RPA management? Let us know on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
Image Source: Shutterstock
MORE ON ECM (ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT)
