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Your Business Information Assets
Information is undoubtedly one of the
most important assets of your business. Its existence is critical
for making viable and timely strategic decisions, fostering product
development, driving marketing, empowering world-class customer
service, and generating revenue. The information and intellectual
property your company spends considerable time and money creating,
and collecting, is contained in your business content. Business
content is a strategic, operational asset that must be aggressively
scrutinized, managed, leveraged and protected.
What is Business Content And How
Is It Used?
Realizing A Return On Business Information
Your business generates huge volumes of information that can fuel
productivity and enrich your relationships with customers, partners
and employees. But if your organization is like most, 85
percent of this information does not fall into the structured
formats of automated file systems or databases. Instead, it
exists in a wide range of unstructured formats, such as images,
documents, e-mail, reports, audio, video and Web content. As
you strive to make your operations more cost-effective and
efficient, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) products can help you
address a critical challenge —managing and integrating all forms of
information across diverse solutions and business processes —and
delivering it to end users when and where they need it.
Issues:
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Paper clogs work processes and hurts
productivity
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Work processes are not automated
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No concurrent use
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Email not treated as a business asset
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Office documents not in an enterprise
library
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Customer service is slow
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Difficult to contribute to Web sites
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Business content not screened for
compliance
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Discovery process is slow
Streamlining Operations, Cutting Costs
Employees are spending a lot of time managing content and
considerable effort looking for it —up to one-third of their time.
Such unproductive activity may only increase. Experts expect
that over the next three years, businesses will create more
information than has been generated in all of history. An IBM
DB2 ECM solution enables you to access, manage and integrate
business content easily, without regard for its format or location,
helping to boost productivity and collaborative efforts.
Customer service representatives can quickly and conveniently access
information across diverse sources to respond to a customer request.
Instead of traveling for education, employees can simply log on to
the corporate intranet for training on demand. And through
ready access to all the organization’s information resources, they
can capitalize on cross-and up-selling opportunities to generate new
sources of revenue.
Deliver Personalized Content On Demand
Industry studies show that ECM solutions can turn a $4 paper-based
transaction into a 4-cent digital transaction. Multiply this
reduction by the volume of daily transactions occurring in your
business, and you can get an idea of potential savings.
Delivering a Comprehensive, Responsive Solution With
Rich Functionality
IBM DB2 Content Manager and IBM DB2 Content Manager OnDemand, the
core products in the IBM content management family, provide a key to
productivity gains. With DB2 content management solutions, you
can retrieve content from a single Web-based interface. DB2
Content Manager stores, manages and distributes many forms of
content or unstructured information, while DB2 Content Manager
OnDemand enables high-volume capture of computer output as well as
archiving of scanned documents.
IBM DB2 Information Integrator for Content helps to simplify
information access and integration from various IBM and non-IBM
sources, to quickly and easily enhance e-business applications.
In addition, DB2 Content Manager leverages the full strength of the
IBM software portfolio, including IBM DB2 Universal Database™ for
its indexing and searching capabilities, WebSphere® software for
advanced workflow, Web
application, portal and personalization functions, Lotus® software
for collaboration solutions such as instant messaging and e-meetings
and IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager for content storage.
By raising productivity — and allowing your employees to focus on
more strategic tasks — a DB2 Content Manager solution delivers what
you need to build your competitive advantage. The Coca-Cola
Company, for example, used DB2 Content Manager, IBM Lotus Notes®
and IBM Lotus Domino™ to build a digital library of its advertising
and marketing assets. Roughly 9,000 print graphics and more
than 4,000 television commercials (a figure that will rise to over
25,000 in the next 2 years), as well as internal documents and meta
data, are accessible over the corporate net work to employees in
more than 200 countries. Employees can now collaborate more
efficiently and effectively boosting campaign development
productivity and lowering costs.
Transforming The Customer Experience
By facilitating quick electronic access to multiple content sources,
a DB2 Content Manager solution can help provide a faster response to
customer requests. For example, a call center representative
discussing an invoice discrepancy with a customer on the phone can
instantly retrieve the digitized bill, as well as other relevant
customer information such as correspondence, order history and
payments. DB2 Content Manager and DB2 Content Manager OnDemand
make this possible.
You can also use the same solutions to offer your customers the
convenience of electronic bill presentment and payment. Of
course, good customer support involves more than removing paper from
your processes. For instance, by leveraging your multimedia
assets, from video clips to sound bites, you can deliver a richer
level of information and services. IBM DB2 Content Manager
VideoCharger™ provides the means. An open standards-based
audio and video streaming solution, DB2 Content Manager VideoCharger
lets you mix multimedia data with other data types to support
customer service as well as security, sales, education and many
other applications.
When employees have ready access to your company’s information
assets, they can be that much more productive when collaborating
with colleagues and taking care of business.
Complying With Record Keeping Rules And Regulations
While content is
streaming in and out of your business, there is also the alphabet
soup of
compliance requirements laws, corporate policy rules and
potential litigation exposure your business content can be
susceptible to every day. The net result? Today’s rules of managing
and protecting your business information have changed, and in a big
way. The stakes are high. How well your company intelligently
manages content and intellectual property will make or break your
business. Just ask Arthur Anderson.
The volumes of electronic and paper-based records that your business
generates each day can be overwhelming. You need to access
this information when it is required and dispose of it when it’s
time. IBM DB2 Records Manager helps you manage these tasks and
comply with government regulations as well as industry and legal
standards for corporate accountability.
Managing e-records throughout their lifecycle, DB2 Records Manager
can be seamlessly embedded into a variety of business applications
and complies with the U. S. DoD 5015.2 June 2002 standard for
e-records management. Additionally, managing the staggering
increase in the volume of system documents and e-mail is a challenge
across companies today. IBM DB2 CommonStore solutions for SAP,
Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange Server archive key data and
documents, while providing users direct access on demand.
DB2 CommonStore for SAP stores and manages SAP R/3 business data and
documents associated with SAP business transactions. DB2
CommonStore for Lotus Domino and DB2 CommonStore for Exchange Server
deliver an integrated, electronic, shared repository solution for
archiving and rapidly retrieving e-mails and associated attachments.
With these offerings, you can enhance collaboration, comply with
regulatory standards and reduce storage costs.
Learn more about regulatory compliance.
Benefiting From IBM ’s Open, Robust Technology
The IBM DB2 content management portfolio can be instrumental in
lowering the cost of managing your business-critical content.
In addition, with its powerful programming interfaces and
integration with leading independent software vendor applications
—such as Siebel for customer relationship management, and PeopleSoft
and SAP for enterprise resource planning — the IBM DB2 content
management solutions enable you to leverage your existing
applications and information infrastructure to achieve a lower cost
of ownership.
IBM DB2 content management solutions support open standards such as
XML and incorporate leading technology for digital rights and rich
media management. Robust, reliable and scalable, the portfolio
is designed to provide a rapid return on your information
investments — which is what you can always expect from IBM and
PriceCompete.
An enterprise content management solution from IBM and PriceCompete
can make the difference between adequate and stellar customer
service.
You've got questions, we've got answers.
Contact PriceCompete today for
business information anxiety relief with a FREE
Executive Assessment.
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