Document Management Systems

Managing unstructured content

Document Management Systems are still evolving and banks, telcos, manufacturers and SMBs have started investing in this technology. By Vinita Gupta

In many developed nations, the market for Document Management Systems (DMS) has matured, but in India we are seeing some traction in large business. The situation is set to change in 2009-10. With unstructured content growing at a rate of 65-200% depending upon the industry vertical, and rising levels of awareness amongst organizations of the need to manage data, an aggressive growth phase in the DMS market is not too far away.

DMS is high on the agenda of companies in the manufacturing, BFSI and telecom verticals—these companies have large transaction-oriented business with diversified departments. There has been adoption by pharmaceuticals and government sector verticals as well where safeguarding intellectual property rights is important.

Avinash Garg, Technical Head-CMA, EMC India and SAARC, revealed that according to IDC, the Indian DMS market is expected to be worth around $50 million by 2012. It is growing at a CAGR of 22.93%, which happens to be the highest rate in the APAC market. Presently, the market is in the $23 million range.

Shailender Kumar, Vice President, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle India added, “The financial services and telecom industries have already started to deploy enterprise content management solutions, primarily because of the large volumes of data that they have to secure. The government and manufacturing verticals are following suit to automate and access their content online.”

According to Sanjeev Samla, Senior Technical Architect, Patni, “The DMS market in India is catching up rapidly. Large MNCs have a footprint in India; the market is going to extend here too. SMBs are showing interest.”

Business drivers

The basic elements of a growing enterprise today are—productivity, connectivity, security and cost efficiency. In line with this, a DMS has an important role to play. Retrieving a two-year old document manually would typically take a day. That kind of retrieval time in the current dynamic situation could mean loss of a business opportunity or lack of customer commitment. Moreover, a paper document lying in the office or elsewhere is at a higher risk of getting into the wrong hands. A secure DMS can eliminate this threat entirely. A smooth document workflow is of supreme importance in certain processes.

Gartner estimates factors such as increasing real estate prices, and reducing prices for storage and capture technologies are driving DMS adoption. Businesses are looking at DMS as a solution for department-wise process automation.

The growing importance of documents which is being fueled by the demands of regulatory compliance, the need to communicate with customers, suppliers and employees in multiple media, and the role of documents in achieving ROI for business process solution investments (e.g. ERP, CRM, content management, and collaborative applications) are other factors that contribute towards expanding this market.

Adoption by SMBs

Because of their size and business volume, most of the SMBs business are driven by competition, customer and product/services they offer; how fast they act and adopt the latest technical know-how and capitalize, would decide their market share. DMS help them to collaborate and communicate in real-time with their suppliers, customers and employees, which a major challenge right now.

“There is certainly a growing need for DMS in the SMB sector but there is a huge gap between the need and the supply side. SMBs need to be educated about DMS and it should also be affordable for them,” said Kishlay Ray, General Manager-Marketing, Sharp Business Systems (India).

Punit Jain, VP - Marketing, Newgen Software asserted that while traditionally large enterprises have been the customer base for DMS vendors, of late the SMBs has also emerged as a potentially strong candidate for DMS solutions. They have realized the value of adopting a robust and scalable DMS solution early on, and are ready to invest in a proven DMS. The biggest challenge before any company, be it a large enterprise or an SMB, is to provide its employees timely, seamless access to information. This helps the organization focus on its core expertise instead of wasting precious hours searching for information. In fact, that has been the reason of a number of SMBs going bust within a few years of operation.

Jain added, “DMS vendors offering tailored solutions suited to the individual business needs of SMBs at an affordable price has motivated adoption by them at an early stage. Moreover, implementing at an early stage is less time consuming and easier to integrate with existing systems.”

“Many larger DMS vendors see the SMB segment as a market opportunity since their upper end client base has been saturated. Document management, as a whole, is growing in the SMB market. Whether implemented as a remote (application service provider or ASP) or locally hosted solution, document management is a popular solution for SMBs because it helps them to streamline information management. SMBs are finding that DMS enable them to securely and efficiently store both digitized copies of paper documents and electronic files,” said Murthy Veeraghanta, Co-founder and Chairman, VSoft.

Garg revealed, “In the SMB segment, operational efficiency and reduced operational costs take predominance. Here DMS systems will help reduce the costs associated with office supplies like paper and printing supplies. Paper-intensive tasks are significantly reduced using DMS.” SMBs using DMS have an edge over their rivals in engaging and retaining their customers as a result of increased productivity.

More of the same

Content management is the latest emerging trend that will give impetus to DMS. Other trends include socialization of content management, mash-ups and content management 2.0 and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

Mark Petit, Executive Director for Xerox Global Services, said, “Technology once evolved, always passes through the trends of optimization. Today in this DMS space the optimization of storage, bandwidth, readiness and accuracy of data are the latest trends.” Xerox has offerings build around the DMS space to offer the platform to optimize these areas. Just to name a few again XMPAI, XPIM, etc., can be used. BFSI, telecom and retail are the verticals that offer great scope for growth.

Kumar mentioned that content consolidation is looked upon as the immediate pain area in global markets and India is not far behind. Companies are moving from conventional imaging solutions and adopting a one-vendor approach that can help consolidate their content and manage a compliance-based document lifecycle. They are looking out for software solutions where digital rich media, user desktop folders, office communications, customer documents and also digitized customer papers are stored in a searchable robust eFolder.

Future of DMS in India

Worldwide large organizations have implemented DMS for efficient working or reducing paper-based processing. India lags behind this mindset. At the moment, though compliance is being talked about, real implementations are few. Current usage is typically for customer record management, mainly in telecom, centralization of paper intensive business for banks and insurers, file tracking initiatives for e-Governance and image enablement of ERP systems.

The DMS market has evolved over the years, and today it has become a core business process in some enterprises. Organizations that have not yet leveraged DMS will be looking at it as a potential business enabler. The market is set to grow at a considerable pace.

Petit remarked that the market for DMS has gathered momentum over the past three to four years. It is emerging as a huge opportunity for vendors as large businesses continue to use paper and traditional means of storage. Growth has been primarily triggered by the increasing need for automation in the enterprise. The vast amount of information, which was being stored in physical files has to be digitized. This has opened a floodgate of opportunities for document management solution providers.

“Although 98% of the documents in use will be required for future reference, at least 50-80% of a company’s information lies totally unstructured and mostly scattered in documents, e-mail messages and attachments. In a bid to manage vital documents and streamline the workflow, businesses require efficient DMS, which will enable authorized user groups to locate, share, update, review, store and retrieve data in the most effective manner,” said Veeraghanta.

The amount of electronic content, unstructured data and documents is growing rapidly. Organizations are in need of advanced, automated content and process management solutions to manage this information explosion. Beyond safeguarding and maintaining the information, it is important to organize the information in a way that is simple, useful and creates knowledge for the user. As regulatory and compliance obligations increase in India, organizations are likely to increasingly turn to DMS to automate document- and paper-based business processes, so that they are efficient, reliable and auditable.

vinita.gupta@expressindia.com