Enterprise content management systems are some of the central software tools that keep any company together. In today’s fast-moving and heavily digitized business environment, an employee’s ability to call up a piece of information on demand can determine the overall speed and effectiveness of the organization’s workflows.
Choosing the right ECM platform for a particular organization’s needs can represent a serious and positive change, whether the business is upgrading an existing legacy solution or starting from an even less developed setup, with no existing ECM systems at all.
If it’s been too long since your firm has considered its ECM capabilities, now may be a perfect time to examine your system and calculate the potential benefits of an upgrade.
With a high-quality ECM platform, stakeholders will be able to search for and find the information they need, when they need it.
What is Enterprise Content Management Software?
The first step to picking appropriate ECM solutions is to define what these tools do and what your company plans to accomplish with them. Simply put, ECM is the tool companies use to access their documents, across many disparate file types and storage locations. An ECM platform connects everything from emails to stored content that may consist of plans and other highly specific construction-industry files.
With a high-quality ECM platform, stakeholders will be able to search for and find the information they need, when they need it. ECM use makes each individual project easier to organize and oversee, and also helps the company transition smoothly from one project to the next, with all content associated with each job securely filed away in thematic groupings.
Good ECM tech tools have the native ability to work with many document types and use integration APIs to work with third-party tools for more esoteric files. If your organization currently doesn’t use such simplified approaches to document management, you may see immediate benefits once you’ve implemented ECM.
How Does Enterprise Content Management Benefit Your Business?
Communication and exchange of information are critical parts of any construction project. Stakeholders’ ability to quickly access a request for information or change order can keep operations on the right path. Long, manual searches for content, on the other hand, may delay and complicate projects. Even worse is the confusion and waste created by unnecessarily duplicated information or inaccuracies that have entered the system due to human error.
A strong tech environment is arranged around a capable ECM.
Your company will find that as time passes, with more projects and the potential for growth and expansion, the need to have a strong ECM platform at the heart of the organization’s tech stack will only become more pressing and urgent.
Regulators requesting access to particular information for legal compliance reasons is an especially time-sensitive and high-priority use case for ECM. Producing the requested documents quickly is vital for your company to avoid fines, delays and other consequences of losing track of its content.
A strong tech environment is arranged around a capable ECM. This central solution must be strong to ensure other essential systems, such as financials, inventory management, drawing management and more, are fed from the same accurate, centralized and consistent source of data truth.
Why Choose ECM Solutions Made for the Construction Industry?
When your contractor firm selects an ECM platform, it pays to pick technology designed with construction in mind, one that will help you cope with the unique aspects of the construction industry. Since nearly all your work is project based, you have to follow a patchwork of national and regional regulations, and you need to store and track unique document types – such as architectural plans, the use case for a construction-specific ECM is clear.
Rather than purchasing a general-industry ECM tool and attempting to customize it to provide the needed functionality, you can favor a feature set that makes sense for you. Going from no ECM at all to a system tailored to the needs of the construction industry can represent an enormous leap in functionality – there’s no need to settle for a non-specialized version of the technology.
Why Should You Choose CMiC for ECM?
Contractors of all sizes and specialties need information management systems that make sense for their operational profiles and business objectives. The purpose-built feature set of CMiC makes it an ideal choice in this respect, as does its ability to integrate smoothly with the types of business applications contractors are already using and choose not to replace.
New projects increase the scale and complexity of the content a business has to hold, so it’s important to have an ECM platform that can keep up.
The cloud-based and flexible nature of CMiC gives it a different life cycle than an on-premise software deployment. Instead of deploying the tool now and then having to heavily modify or replace it when your firm grows, changes and expands, stakeholders will find the software suite is capable of growing alongside their operations. New projects increase the scale and complexity of the content a business has to hold, so it’s important to have an ECM platform that can keep up.
Many construction firms are not maximizing their technology utilization today and have room to grow and improve in the way they store, search for and access their commercial data. To discover whether your firm falls into this category – and learn how to recoup quick benefits to your workflows and overall efficiency – speak with a CMiC expert about CMiC ECM solution.