Efficient document management remains on stand-by

According to analysis by research companies, every 3.5 years the volume of paper documents in an organisation doubles, and 80% of employees spend an average of 30 minutes a day searching for information, while 60% spend an hour or more recreating documents that already exist. Under these conditions, one solution to make work more efficient is undoubtedly the adoption of electronic document management solutions, which can improve work by around 50%. However, according to specialists working on the Romanian document management market, the field will not record spectacular growth in the coming period.

Xerox is one of the companies that, over its more than 50 years of existence, has distinguished itself as one of the world leaders in terms of technology dedicated to the creation and management of documents. “Basically, we are “the document company” because we offer specialized services for any process that involves working with documents”, Razvan Botezatu, XGS Manager Xerox Romania and Republic of Moldova told e-Finance.

“Among the latest services launched by Xerox in Romania are electronic document processing solutions, extremely useful for a large number of companies, especially those working with a large number of customers. These scanning and archiving services are, once again, a solution with which Xerox meets the need of its customers to optimize their costs and working time, while reducing, at the same time, the human error rates that occur when processing documents manually”, said the Xerox representative.

These services allow companies to electronically extract relevant information from paper documents – from applications and standard forms to unstructured documents such as CVs, rules, notices or various correspondence, integrate and manage them within various business processes. According to the company, Xerox Corporation has been included by Gartner Inc., one of the leading US IT research and consulting firms, in the world’s leading ManagedPrint Services (MPS ) market for the second consecutive year.

SIVECO Romania provides its customers with the SIVADOC document management solution, which works both on Microsoft Windows operating system and Linux/Unix environment and on any of the renowned database management systems (Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2 or PostGreSQL).

It also provides integration with Microsoft Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook) and integration with the Microsoft Windows environment. “SIVADOC allows centralizing and making available to the entire organization all documents, regardless of how they are entered into the system or their nature (text documents, e-mails, faxes, scanned documents, images),”Ionut Arsene, SIVADOC Project Manager at SIVECO Romania, told revistae-Finance.

At the same time, SIVECO Romania’s document management solution offers for printed documents integration mechanisms with Optical Character Recognition scanning and information extraction systems, and for electronic documents integration mechanisms with electronic messaging systems, fax message management, as well as automatic loading facilities for documents saved in certain folders.

Ominous innovations

One of the newly launched document management suites on the Romanian market, in the fall of 2008, is that of the company FivePlus Solutions: “After two years of investment, together with specialists who have over 10 years of experience in the field and successful implementations on the Romanian market, we have created the DocPlus solution, a suite of applications that deals with document management, information management and process automation. It is a solution based on a renowned technology in “collaborative work”, IBM Lotus and is primarily addressed to the SME sector”, said for e-Finance, Alin Nita, General Manager FivePlus Solutions.

“Our professionalism and experience led us to implement the DocPlus solution in multinational companies, to extend it with new functions to address the public sector, to cover new markets”, said Alin Nita.

According to him, “the capabilities of the DocPlus solution relate to contact management, activity management, project management, contract management, quality management, personnel file, task tracking and coverage of other specific activities”.

To date, the company has sold several dozen licenses for this solution, and customers include private, manufacturing and service-oriented companies, multinationals, agencies and (non-)governmental organisations.

Document management solutions are FivePlus‘ main business direction, with a share of over 70% in the portfolio. The rest of the activities are grouped in the distance learning solutions approach – eLearning, web application development, website optimization from SEO perspective.

Solutions for all types of business

Another player in the document management applications market is Data Management Solutions, which offers three such products: LibertyNet, LibertyNet Office and EDMS.

“Basically, all three solutions are based on the features of the LibertyNET platform. LibertyNET Office is an entry level solution that allows a limited number of local and/or web users. The eDMS solutions are dedicated solutions for specific industries (transport, medical, banking, etc.) built on the LibertyNET platform. The platform is dedicated to electronic document management and has all the basic functionalities of such software as well”, Valentin Griparis, Data Management Solutions Director, told e-Finance.

According to him, among the basic functionalities of the platform are the entry of documents of any type and any format, the possibility of their automatic indexing, quick retrieval of documents, entry on predefined or ad-hoc flows, automatic classification of documents and interconnection with other IT applications of the beneficiary (SAP, ERP, etc.).

Worldwide, the number of the company’s customers using these solutions is around 15,000. In Europe their number has reached about 150, and in Romania Data Management Solutions has 12 implementations.

“As a business vertical, we cover any domain because the solution is 100% customizable. The success of such an implementation depends 50% on the quality of the software whatever it is called. Much more important is the understanding of the organization by the implementer or, more correctly, by the project team, which includes representatives of the beneficiary. As far as requirements are concerned, most customers want to automate workflows while maintaining confidentiality”, added the Data Management Solutions Director.

Effective partnerships

CG&GC Intelligent Technology is one of the companies that initially focused on providing integrated solutions for local government that incorporate document management functionality. With 19 years of experience on the Romanian IT&C market, the company decided in 2008 to agree a partnership with ELO Digital Office to provide solutions for the business segment. “A reference implementation for ELO in Romania is right at CG&GC. It is an implementation with about 100 users from 16 branches organized on several departments”, said Cornel Giurgea, CEO CG&GC Group.

Within the group, CG&GC Software Solutions is the company that implements business solutions in several segments: document management, financial management, customer relations, e-government. Through the partnership signed last year, the companies, CG&GC and ELO Romania, come to the customers’ aid with a financing/payment deferment option, and for complex projects composed of software, hardware and services there is the alternative of specialized leasing.

An interesting product for document management is offered by Daf Expert. The “plug & play” solution , Kartha LogicalDOC, is a network device that integrates a large hard disk (1/2/3 Tb) designed to store office documents and files. It can store any kind of digital document (or paper) while the index-link and full-text search functions are specialized for processing unstructured documents.

“As it is a new solution, it has not yet been used by a significant number of users, but the start is encouraging. The price of the solution is 2,540 euros, and those who currently use this product are active in the fields of health, services, education, sports and politics,” Florian Gheorghe, Managing Director, Daf Expert Group, told e-Finance.

Less paper

According to the Xerox representative, the economic climate in which today’s business activities take place shows a clear dynamic of information flows and a growing need for fast access to relevant data for all business processes.

“The speed with which the world is changing, and with it the economies, leads us to think of an acceleration of information flows and an increasing direction to the vast area of electronic space. Coming from a company that, since the patenting of xerography and until today, has consolidated the method of transmitting the message on paper, this statement is not a proof of courage, but of realism and of alignment with the present reality”, said Razvan Botezatu.

According to him, in the case of Xerox customers “the data delivery time from receipt of documents to delivery of data to customers is a maximum of 24 hours, but can be reduced to the level of minutes if the information is vital to the functioning of the respective business process”.

The SIVECO Romania representative is of the opinion that “computerized document and process management can become a significant advantage in the current competitive context, as process optimization, standardization and electronic document signing can bring immediate benefits to any company”. According to him, the SIVADOC solution can reduce paper consumption by at least 30% as a result of circulating and storing documents electronically between departments or to/from external partners.

50% more productive

According to Alin Nita, General Manager of FivePlus Solutions, research companies claim that by adopting standardized communication and document management solutions, the degree of improvement of the activity increases by at least 50%. “For some activities that we have automated from a document management solutions perspective, we have had time reductions for document approval from one to two weeks to a few hours,” he pointed out.

“When it is realized that such solutions contribute significantly to reducing administrative, operational costs, more efficient communication for solving day-to-day tasks, reducing or eliminating “walking maps”, increasing productivity, better control over activities, it is a matter of time and decision to adopt them,” added the FivePlus Solutions representative.

Alex Barbulescu, managing director of CG&GC Software, said that the main advantage of a company that implements a good document management system is the efficient organization of document-based processes and flows. “Closely related is the retrieval of documents, which in such a system is done in real time. There is no need to search the physical archive and waste time travelling,” he added.

At the same time, Cristian Stanescu, CG&GC Solutions direct sales director, said that the number of customers requesting Toshiba digital departmental equipment is growing, but not so for customers who benefit from a dedicated document management solution complete with hardware plus software.

The number of clients is increasing

Razvan Botezatu, XGS Manager Xerox Romania and Republic of Moldova, told e-Finance that the number of Xerox customers using document management outsourcing services increased in 2009, as companies started to realize the benefits of these solutions. In general, the majority of Xerox Global Services customers come from the private sector, in areas such as finance-banking, telecommunications, manufacturing, etc.

Xerox Romania’s service division offers three distinct services: office services (Xerox Office Services), communication and promotion services (Document Outsourcing & Communication Services) and business process services (Business Process Services), and the document management department seems to be gaining more and more weight in the company’s portfolio. “At the moment we do not have data on the share of each individual service sector in the total turnover, but the growth of the entire document management department in 2008 was 28%, above the company’s average growth of 18%. Share data for the XOS, DOCS, and BPS divisions will be available early next year,” the Xerox representative said.

At 3.5 years the volume of paper documents doubles

The representative of SIVECO Romania said that according to specialists, every 3.5 years the volume of paper documents in an organization doubles, so that in the absence of a unified management of the entire flow of documents can cause bottlenecks or delays in carrying out activities.

“The evolution of the document management market has been consistently positive, with clients gaining a better understanding of the benefits they can gain. Such an IT system is essential especially in the public sector – administration, public services, financial/banking, industrial – where a large volume of documents is processed”, said Ionut Arsene, Project Manager SIVADOC within SIVECO Romania.

On the other hand, Alin Nita, General Manager of FivePlus Solutions, is of the opinion that during the economic crisis there is clearly less interest in document management solutions. “They are built for the development of a company, optimization and improvement of activities, many companies are now going for the preservation of existing technology. But there are signs that the message ‘The IT strategy always reflects the strategy of the organisation – No costs, no profit’ has been Inteles. For example, in the public administration sector, reducing staff broadly solves the cost problem, but activities still need to be done, and one solution is to implement document management applications,” said FivePlus Solutions representative.

A $10 million market

Valentin Griparis, director of Data Management Solutions, says that in Romania there will not be a substantial increase in demand for document management software licenses sales in the coming period.“In this period, from our point of view, the sales of these software categories are constant. Compared to the North American market, the demand is not as high in Europe, let alone in Romania”, said DM Solutions director.

According to the SOFTWIN group of companies, a prestigious presence in Romanian document management through ASCENTA, the local document management market has grown considerably in recent years, reaching over $7.5 million in 2007 and about $10 million last year. It is estimated that in 2010 it will reach a value of around $13 million. There are also highly ambitious views, which do not agree with the general opinion in the market. Florian Gheorghe, Managing Director, Daf Expert Group, claims that the local document management market is currently worth around €25-30 million. “The outlook is 70-80 million Euro out of a minimum requirement of 400-500 million Euro”, he added. Emiliana Dovan