IBM ECM Reviews

IBM Enterprise Content Management suite(ICN2.0.3 for Filenet CM 5.2.1) is an enterprise-ready robust collaboration solution for knowledge workers that would meet the broad needs of the entire enterprise(Eg document-records management,search,scanning(datacap). cloud ready etc), compared to the other competitors offerings in the market.

It has helped business areas to centralize storage,usage,search,dispositon of digital content and assets from multiple sources without a lot of training and helped IT to consolidate multiple vendor tools without a lot of customization but certainly with some tweaking-multiple upgrades with assistance from IBM . Our future plans for ECM users is to allow them digitize,store and collaborate easily on one platform.

I'd have to say scalability is the most valuable feature. I know there are vendors out there that have products that are really good at collaboration and good at project work, but FileNet/IBM really excels when you get into the hundreds of thousands – the millions – of documents, and having some structure and some metadata on those documents.

Usability is pretty good, especially with Navigator. What I saw at a recent conference was a lot of people engaging the user experience people; usability testing. I think Content Navigator gives you the flexibility to do so much stuff with the layout that we can probably just push that to some team to figure out, and I don't have to worry about where some text box goes or some masking of a field or something. We can leave that to people for whom it’s their bread and butter.

I'm still a little new to this organization, but I think forcing users to use some sort of taxonomy, having users understand their data better, so they can classify it and retrieve it has improved this organization. The old way would be storing documents in a file system, in folders, and that's just chaos. It’s probably a little generic, but the big driver is having more control over that data.

We are considering employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or box solutions. I think we have resource constraints. We have some people that might be retiring, so I'm looking toward augmenting our team in whatever ways we can, including cloud, hybrid cloud, and so on.

We're still working on providing analytics and reporting services for my organization. Reporting is one of the areas that we've fallen a little bit behind in ECM. We're just not there yet, but we're definitely looking at that.

We're now able to provide better content management services than had existed before.

I think a lot of the internal and external customer experiences have gotten better, just at a high level, due to our implementation of FileNet, going from a bunch of weird VB6 and PowerBuilder client server apps to something that is distributed computing and can scale out, scale up, etc.

I think performance has improved, and then also that relates to supportability. If you have a bunch of client server apps, you have a lot of people that need to work on a desktop team to support them. I think there's some value there.

I think we're looking at including mobile. I honestly don't know the business side a whole lot. I'm more involved with the infrastructure, but I know we're looking at mobile. We've played around with ICN Mobile. I know we'll probably be doing Datacap at some point.

I like the granularity that Datacap offers. I've worked with other capture solutions before, including FileNet Capture, Kofax and Captiva, to some extent. I haven't seen such a granular capture product. Because of that, we can achieve any level of customization. We can meet all business requirements, and that's great.

The second advantage of Datacap is the flexibility that it offers. There are a lot of actions. If I want to, I choose something like, for example, in OCR, there are multiple libraries I can use. I can even import third-party libraries. I can build my own libraries, and include it in. That's great. I like that part of Datacap.

We just started. We went live four months ago. We are really not using any advanced features of Datacap. Nonetheless, in terms of benefits, we definitely see better monitoring and better recording of statistics. Now, we can better manage our processes. Initially, with older captures, the reporting was a pain, but now we have very good reporting; that's one advantage. The second advantage is in terms of performance. We have some very good performance; no complaints at all in terms of performance. We are doing OCR-ing and high-speed indexing. We have considerably large volumes and Datacap is handling it pretty well.

It's actually helped us standardize our content ingestion piece. We receive anywhere from 10,000 to 12,000 documents a day. It's helped us standardize that process across six different business units. We've seen a reduction of error rates. We've seen much easier training on the new platform.

We haven't implemented the Case Manager piece yet, but we feel that's going to give us some tremendous benefits in re-engineering business processes, and making the system work more like the business processes.

The usability from our standpoint has been very, very good. With the new version of Datacap that we're on now, what had took nine months to train somebody, now takes just a couple weeks. Datacap is pretty intuitive, the way we have it set up. People are productive within the first day or two that they're there on site.

It provides a very simplified process. It's a lot more flexible than the system we had before. It allows us, again, to create those business processes on the platforms that more closely represent the actual business processes. It's got a lot of capabilities to be extended. We've glued into our infrastructure. Our ecosystem can talk to many other systems. A lot of things that had been manual in the past are now automated.

We are not yet considering employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or box solutions.

We haven't yet leveraged any new analytics or content management services. Because I went to a recent World of Watson conference, my eyes were opened to a whole lot of content analytics that we wanted to do as soon as I got back.

There are probably a lot of operational efficiencies, as I’ve mentioned. I think it's going to make us more acquisition ready. We'll be able to hide a lot of complexity as we acquire new systems. We can glue them into the ECM platform very, very easily; keep a very standardized process across business units. That'll help us acquire companies much more rapidly and, more importantly, absorb them into Western and Southern.

We have plans to eventually include mobile as well, in a couple of different ways: our interaction with our end customers, our policyholders, our contract holders, probably some exchange of information with agents. I don't know, yet, how we're going to fully roll that out.

We've had Datacap in place about eighteen months. It's been very successful in the business unit that's using that. We're still working on the Case Manager piece. The first workflow should go live after the first of the year. We expect a very similar experience with our customers there.

Most of the government projects use IBM ECM. We have over 60 developers on the IBM cloud network for automation, business development, etc.

Most bigger projects with over 50 million documents use IBM ECM. We have more than 16 such projects in Saudi Arabia.

We use Advanced Case Management to automate the claims and the underwriting processes. We also use a lot of bulk condition tools where we get unstructured content from various sources. We just kind of pump them through IBM tools into the FileNet depository. That adds a lot of value to the process and it also enhances our servicing capabilities to the end customers.

It is mostly the management of the unstructured content, and defined automated work flows to streamline the processes; those kinds of things.

Case Manager’s most valuable feature is its ability to store all of our documents in a single place that we can give the business lines access to. By business lines, I mean accounting, credit, finance, risks, sales; all of our partners and customers are working together. For example, for the legal department, we generate all the contracts. We need a place to store those, and also give people the ability to go back and search prior versions and legacy contracts, things like that. We're also looking at using the workflow tool. It's a new implementation that we're working on. We're really excited about the workflow capabilities that are built into it.

We're using this in conjunction with Emptoris Contract Manager; the authoring and management, full lifecycle, of a contract as well as the company repository that we can give the business lines access to.

We're looking at including mobile because we've got sales people and in, maybe, 130 countries. You’d want to give them the tools so that they can effectively do their job.

So far, usability has been pretty straightforward; it's good.

We're in the proof of concept stage right now. We haven't rolled it out yet. I think it's premature to make any remarks about organizational improvements.

The most valuable features are the enterprise scaling capabilities. It's built on an IBM WebSphere platform and this allows us to scale it. We recently did a banker acquisition, and were able to easily scale the solution. It also performs records management, which some of the other lower-cost ECM solutions don't do. So, it does come with a cost, but those are still the positives of it.

It can store a large amount of content and make it accessible both through APIs and the out-of-box UI. This allows us to segregate content into different repositories, but then provide enterprise access restrictions based on line of business, or roles, or other criteria. This is probably the biggest benefit.