OpenText Extended ECM Reviews

I use extended ECM for procurement, sales, engineering documents, and sometimes invoices and accounts payable or receivable.

The version controls and the business workspace part integrate well with SAP and OpenText, providing granular level control over who accesses the workspace. The seamless integration between SAP and OpenText offers a 360-degree view of documents, facilitating a full-text search capability.

The solution is used for drawing management, EPC transactions, and comprehensive document management.  

The engineering document management system is one of the most valuable features of OpenText Extended ECM. Our company has been using the solution for document management for ten years, and it still functions satisfactorily. Our company also utilizes workflow capabilities along with OpenText Extended ECM for some use cases. 

Our company is an engineering company that creates documents for engineering projects. We use OpenText Extended ECM for the engineering model on top of the content server. We use OpenText Extended ECM to define the entire lifecycle of the document from creation to sending to the vendor and receiving the updated version from the vendor.

We have users all over the world. If someone wants to see the status of a document, they can run the report and get the latest information. They don't need to wait for anything since it is easily searchable from the system.

The automatic document numbering, state management, and process flow are very useful features to go through the full cycle of the document.

The biggest use case in our company, which I help support, is that our accounting department uses it to help compile and do all the tax returns that we use. We are a private company. We work for a wealthy Chicago family, and the accounting department handles thousands of tax returns that they do every year. We use the OpenText Capture product to bring in all the forms and documents and get them into the Content Server. We have built a workflow and reports around that process, which includes getting the documents, compiling the tax returns, having them go through multiple reviews, and then eventually filing them with the IRS.

By implementing this solution, the biggest challenge that we were trying to overcome was to give our accounting department a little bit more visibility into that workflow. Prior to this, they were literally doing everything on paper by hand. We wanted to automate the workflow and have a way to store those documents on a long term. We wanted them to be able to work from home without taking a stack of papers home with them. All these things were the big gains from moving over to it.

They handle thousands of tax returns a year. They are usually in the range of 3,000 to 5,000 every year. It was always a slog and a lot of work to get all that done on time and racing against the October 15th deadline. By giving them visibility in that process, they are now able to run some analytics and organize things better year to year. They can figure out when to do certain things in terms of timing, how things go in a sequential order, and what needs to be done before what. They have been able to do that a lot more easily. There is a lot less tracking of everything on a spreadsheet. They are able to see the data. That has been extremely helpful for them.

I have some personal success stories of some older people who have now retired. Seven or eight years ago when we first did this, they would say, "Why are we doing this? Our way works just fine. It is no big deal." We implemented it, and a year later, we went back and talked to them, and they said, "We actually know what everything is. It is amazing." That was nice. We want people over.

It allows them to collaborate more easily. The content silo here was that an accountant had the papers on their desk, so only they could work on them and look at them, whereas now, anybody can. Anybody who is in the approval process does not need to pick up papers and put them on somebody else's desk. There is a notification that says that somebody needs to go check this out. 

Extended ECM has helped connect our content to our business processes. There is more flexibility. People only have to take their laptops home to do work now. This is something that we have been talking about for a decade but it was something that we were behind on. I am so glad that we already had this in place when COVID hit because otherwise, it would have been a disaster. Because it was in place, it was a pretty seamless transition. 

Extended ECM has helped to increase productivity in our organization, but being on the IT side of things, I do not have the statistics that the account team might have. They are the ones who know how quickly things got done beforehand versus now. I only have a once-a-year meeting with them to discuss what we are improving on for the next year. 

We use it as a single source of support for the company. We store all official confidential documents in OpenText as the final record, keeping with records retention policies.

The challenge that the company was looking to address by implementing OpenText was governance. 

In any organization, if you implement governance, some people follow, and some people are not aware of it. We have to educate and enforce compliance purposes. 

When I started, very few people were using it. Now, I'm doing demos and marketing within the team to encourage everyone to use it for compliance. We have around five million documents and things stored in ECM now.

When it comes to integrations, we are discussing external DCM with Office 365. We are still in the discussion stage, but some Salesforce teams are using OpenText API for Connections.

Since rest API is available for integration capabilities, it's easy for their applications to build their own and integrate. OpenText also gives connectors. It's a little pricey, but it's good that the users have options available. They don't have to build anything.

Moreover, OpenText has helped increase productivity in our organization. It helps full-text indexing search, so when employees upload a document, they can easily find it again later, even if they don't know the metadata. 

I've worked at three or four different companies that have all used some version of OpenText Extended ECM for document management purposes.

Through the years, we've used the solution to manage massive amounts of data and ensure that the employees get what they need in a timely manner.

We help other clients to upgrade or migrate, and we wouldn't be in business without OpenText Extended ECM.

I have used OpenText Extended ECM within the oil and gas industries for capital projects, workflow automation, and content storage and retention. We used the solution to enhance the performance and stabilize the applications. We also use it to add more capabilities into the extended ECM for the engineering module, which we use heavily in our industry, especially for document controllers.

One of the critical items I'm looking for is to enhance the transmitters within the third parties. I need a transmitter that receives inbound and outbound documents from third-party contractors who don't have access to our environment.

OpenText Extended ECM has helped us with the implementation of records management policies, content retention and storage, and process automation. It has also helped us with the collaboration between the engineers, document controllers, and third-party vendors.

My main use of this content server is to help end-users manage their documents without accessing SAP. 

We keep SAP data confidential, and whatever data is required for end-users, we make it available in a content server so end users can directly access the OpenText server to access their data and perform operations.

There are many features. One is the security, then the permissions management is really good, and the workspace, folder structure, and classification categories. The classification categories are mainly helpful for searching data, and the workspace is for managing projects. Permission management is really important for the end user.

The collaboration tool is another good feature. Many users on the team can work together on the same platform and the same document to collaborate.

It improved our team's productivity.