• Market Trends: Providers of Managed Content Services Help Their Customers With Business Processess
• Ken Weilerstein
• 30 April 2015
• What more can you offer MPS customers once you eliminate 20% of their waste printing through pull printing and usage tracking? We explain the business-process-related solutions that are emerging in MCS, what buyer trends drive demand, and how these solutions are being tied to other technologies.

• Though business process automation and optimization both offer opportunities, they are not identical in terms of the skills you need in order to provide them or the relationship that you need to have with your customer.
• Business process solutions look like an easy way to pick up some extra revenue from MPS customers, but they are actually an important developmental activity for printer and MFP suppliers. The solutions you choose to develop today will shape your company's competencies beyond the printing-centric ones and pave the way for your future business.
• Business process automation and optimization complement established technologies, such as ECM and business process management, rather than replacing them.

• In paving the way with customers for MCS, use your current MPS engagements to identify new operational contacts in your customer organizations. For example, departmental and workgroup managers directly benefit from shorter cycle times for work processes. The lead contacts for MPS in IT or purchasing may lack the authority to initiate a business process automation solution, but can still help you identify contacts or provide a reference.
• Once you have established MCS customers, use your business process solutions to expand your contact points inside the customer organizations. Go beyond the usual printer-centric roles to engage operational managers. Those contacts will help protect you against competitors and also prepare the way for you to launch new products and services to reduce your own dependence on paper and printing revenue.
• Design and implement your business-process related solutions so they bring consultative value to the planning phase, and so that the customer benefits from your expertise with implementation and support. Don't rely solely on selling software or cloud services the customer could also buy elsewhere.

Managed content services (MCS) represent the extension of established managed print services (MPS) practices into new categories of services. Two of those categories are business process automation and business process optimization. Though MCS is still immature overall, the technologies and service structure the providers offer is becoming clearer, as is the way different kinds of buyers react. It is important for today's MPS providers and printer and multifunction product (MFP) suppliers to understand these trends and to take stock of the opportunities they bring.

MPS customers often ask for the reduced dependency on paper and accelerated business processes that business process automation and optimization can provide, but they don't necessarily understand how to get there. It's not that the tools are entirely lacking. Most large and midsize organizations have enterprise content management (ECM) software, with customers spending $5.1 billion annually in total worldwide, but most ECM customers use it in a limited way that focuses on only certain categories of prominent documents and processes. Business process automation solutions allow customers to digitize paper documents from many processes and bring them into ECM and other business systems at just the right point in the process. For example, a university enrollment process that requires documentation of the student's finances and academic performance might reduce the processing time and shorten the time to receive federal subsidies by feeding digitized and indexed images of paper documents into an ECM system while the student is visiting the admissions office, instead of waiting until all of the documents are in place and then scanning them as a batch. In this example, the scope of the business process automation is limited to a specific process, and the focus is on the document capture phase. Business process automation solutions may leverage existing ECM repositories, or where none exist, MCS providers can also create custom on-premises or cloud-based repositories with full-text search and retrieval. Though the customers might create such a departmental solution on their own, the MCS provider brings the expertise and staffing to design, implement and support the solution. MCS providers are gradually building up that expertise today since, returning to the example, enrollment processes are found in different organizations and across many sectors.

Business process optimization may be required, since digitizing paper documents isn't always enough. Sometimes the process itself needs to be revisited and simplified. For example, a midsize professional services company follows a process for orienting new hires to its own, proven methodology and internal procedures. The problem is that the managers responsible for this orientation find the reporting of the orientation steps leading to certification cumbersome, and often fall behind, sometimes forcing HR to intervene. Automating the reporting process with a simple forms automation solution has cut the time involved significantly, but managers continue to lag in completing this step. Further automation might have cut the time spent reporting. But a systematical optimization of the process folded the data gathering about the progress of all of the recent hires into an existing, unrelated, HR reporting process. This reduced the number of reporting processes from two to one, and reduced the number of reporting instances from approximately one per week for each recent hire, to a single weekly process for all of the recent hires. It also reduced the time the busy managers spend filling out online forms by moving this task to an HR administrator who already contacts them regularly.

MCS providers are not the only ones that help organizations automate their business processes, but MPS engagements provide you access to established customers, without which business process automation providers would need to seek out distributors, or add personnel to sell their business process services directly. The printer equipment and supplies revenue, in effect, subsidizes the cost of selling business process automation solutions. In addition, MPS needs assessments spotlight just how much paper is being printed, and MPS customers often tell us they would like to reduce their dependence on paper. MFPs are often used to scan and route the documents as well, and an important part of the business process automation solution may be the job of programming the MFPs to prepare scanned documents for the next step in the process.

Business process optimization also draws on the research that MPS providers conduct in the needs assessment stage. The assessment may, for example, reveal individuals and departments that do unusually intensive printing as candidates for a business-process-specific assessment that pinpoints the paper-intensive processes that may have been overlooked in earlier business process management initiatives.

Gartner polled the largest and most globally entrenched MPS providers about their business process automation and optimization solutions in 2014. Although important gaps remain, their responses, and what we hear from their customers, show signs of maturation.

Konica Minolta Content

Every Department Can Use Document Management
Regardless of your industry, you have core functions that can be simplified. These back-office operations, from Accounts Payable (AP)/Receivable (AR), to Human Resources (HR) and Contracts can be streamlined with an ECM solution for easily realized gains in productivity and efficiency.

• AP and AR – Accelerate your processing four-fold – with the same staff. Eliminate bottlenecks with rules-based workflows that alert reviewers to when their actions are due. Easily monitor the process – for continuous improvement.
• HR – Give multiple authorized users access to information previously locked in paper and reduce the burden of paper files and retrieval costs. Never lose misfiled documents.
• Contracts – Optimize your contract management with a single repository where authorized users can easily retrieve, review and collaborate. Track all edits for a full history of changes and increase visibility on the status of your contracts.

Learn more about ECM department solutions (AP: AR: HR: Contracts) and how scaling your solution can get your core more efficient.

Insurance: Accelerate Claims Processing
An ECM solution means faster service to your customers and more profitability for you – since you are reducing the cost of executing the claim.

• In a world where information is readily available, policy holders place greater demands on you to provide similar, immediate service.
• Challenged with processing enormous amounts of information (structured and unstructured), you need a central repository with digital content for easy tracking, retrieval and review.
• Seamless integration with your existing systems enables our solutions to give you shared information enterprise-wide.
• Mobile technology speeds the information flow from your customers and enables your team to take action on your claim-processing workflow – from wherever they are. Plus, there are alerts to ensure users know when their response is due.

Read more about solutions to improve your insurance workflows

Lending: Take Control of the Mortgage Process
Stop rekeying data across a loan's processing phases and abandon manual, time-consuming steps that stall your loan-processing workflow with the unparalleled automation and visibility an ECM solution provides.

• Eliminate massive paper files and reduce the risk of losing documents and the cost of transporting/storing physical files.
• Reduce your processing cycle with technology that enables the capturing of data in accordance with your business rules and authorizes access to the data to ensure security.
• Curb compliance worries with easy tracking.
• Minimize the trauma of preparing for audits with digital content that you can easily identify for auditors – giving them a view of just what they need – and not free rein through your organization's files.
• Be prepared for the dramatic increase in applications when interest rates drop – with efficient workflows, mobile-enabled submissions, automated tracking/exception rules and alerted reviewers.

Learn more about ECM solutions to improve process efficiency and cut costs

Healthcare: Provide Access to Information
From Patient Review to Patient Accounting, a scalable ECM solution for your healthcare system gives you access to all information. Capturing images to accelerate a clinician's review, patient enrollment, HR onboarding or AP processing – along with access to the information for collaboration or routine workflows – allows for efficient healthcare information management.

• For case management
• From your EMR to support collaboration
• From disparate systems (e.g., radiology) for a complete patient record view
• From anywhere – hospital, practice, home – for quick evidence-based answers
• To centralized payment processing across multiple billing systems
• To improve patient care satisfaction

Download an overview of how ECM solutions drive improvements in patient care and service

Higher Education: Collect and Manage Student Processes
From enrollment processing to transcript matching and financial aid processing, you are challenged with collecting the necessary information from students and aggregating the results into one decision for your best-fit candidate. With an ECM solution, you can process faster and make student decisions more quickly, thus successfully yielding the students you want.

• Seamlessly integrate with your student information system (SIS) for a sustainable solution that can manage records, email correspondences, safeguard student confidentiality and improve department-wide productivity.
• Give advisors case management tools to ensure your students successfully complete their requirements and graduate.
• Easily track your international students or veterans – stay in compliance with federal regulations and be ready to provide auditors with the information that they need.
• Give your staff an effective collaboration tool.
• Establish workflows for your routine operations to eliminate bottlenecks and speed up your decisions.

See how you can improve efficiency and cut cost with an ECM solution for education

Government: Trade Paper Processes for Digitized Content
Notorious for paper processes and piles of forms that must be manually handled, state and local agencies can swap file cabinets and unsecured mountains of boxes for digitized content via an ECM solution.

• Avoid paper-based delays
• Electronically automate plan routing and tracking
• Increase transparency into your community
• Meet critical deadlines
• Improve communications
• Control versions, enhance plan review and budget process

Watch how automating core business processes with a customized ECM solution improves your operations.