Compliance and customer service demands emerging as two of today’s most pressing business issues. In response, multiple operations and IT functions are beginning to converge in a strategic approach to addressing the management, storage and delivery of mission-critical information. This convergence, clearly a more efficient approach to traditional data silos and departmental archive solutions, doesn’t have to undermine existing processes and protocols. Nor is this convergence a threat to the people who operate, manage and implement these functions.


As the payments processing and document management environments continue to change with increasing frequency and rising complexity, so do the requirements for automated, flexible controls and processes around the classic information drivers – efficient image and data storage; rules for information access, delivery and reporting; and robust data protection. What’s more, enterprise systems are giving rise to new data demands across businesses.


Robert Stangl, executive vice president of operations, technology and client management for Dallas-based eGistics, Inc., notes that organizations across vertical markets are challenged by ever-increasing amounts of data, broader information access requirements, a greater need for long-term information retention, and more stringent compliance, audit and security demands.


“Information is a corporate asset,” Stangl said, “and businesses are looking for new ways to drive value from it throughout the information lifecycle – from processing to archive.”


Hosted Document Management as an Enabler
Rising cost-consciousness, the increasingly complex regulatory and business environment, and ever-increasing customer (and stakeholder) requirements are placing unprecedented demands on legacy systems and processes. Most organizations have standalone systems for multiple functions and business units, each addressing data management differently.


What organizations need is not only effective information management and transparency in their enterprise payments and document automation strategies, but also a reasonable return on their investments, plus a means for increasing corporate agility.
Gary Provo, executive vice president at eGistics, said systems decisions now are being driven by the need to manage rising data volumes, reduce data management inefficiencies and cost, resolve inadequate data access, streamline compliance, and enhance customer service.


“Studies show that 30 percent of a worker’s day is spent on non-productive data retrieval,” Provo said. “And companies spend an average of 10 to 15 percent of their revenues on document-related costs – three times the average amount they spend on R&D. Clearly, paper represents a significant obstacle to operating a more efficient business.”


So who can help? With so many departments, functions and entities trying to streamline information management and reach the goal of compliance in the process, it’s no surprise that companies are rethinking their traditional departmental approach to image and data archive. With information as the common denominator across an organization’s
systems, processes and protocols, it’s easy to see the role of the archive taking on new strategic importance.


Stangl adds, “With SharePoint likely to fuel the already dizzying growth of ECM, it’s more important than ever to guard your document management infrastructure against the data gaps and silos that can put the success of an ECM strategy, and a company’s effectiveness, at risk.”


eGistics Leading the Way
Leading companies are focusing on how they can better manage images and data enterprise-wide as part of their payments processing and document management operations and related decision making. Companies that once were more likely to invest in bigger departmental systems are seeing the value proposition in solutions that drive image and data management, archive and delivery across the enterprise, supporting all legacy systems, processes and protocols. The key driver of this new mindset is hosted document management technology.


Hosted document management solutions establish an integrated approach to information management, streamlining compliance and control, eliminating data silos, driving down operations costs, and supporting better and faster decision making. Hosted document management can reduce information gaps and provide the data enterprise systems need in order to be effective. They can facilitate a payment automation model that is more efficient and effective in supporting business needs, responding to new payment capture and clearing mechanisms, and addressing demands for more detailed remittance data. And with hosted document management, both internal and external stakeholders have greater visibility into their mission critical business information, with better exceptions handling, faster response to customer inquiries, and less latency of valuable information reinforcing its value.


Bob Lund, chairman and CEO of eGistics, noted that, “Hosted document management solutions support images and data from any source, in virtually any format, and integrate easily into existing operations and IT environments, underlying an organization’s ECM or applications infrastructure. This helps eliminate enterprise information gaps and latency.”
Lund said the key elements of the business case for hosted document solutions include:

Totally variable expense
Improved compliance and security
Solution flexibility
Scalability
Guaranteed performance
eGistics is leading the move away from departmental archives towards universal hosted document management solutions. A pioneer in the use of hosted archive solutions in the payments space, last year eGistics acquired Virtual Image Technology, Inc., (VIT), an online archive provider. VIT served healthcare, financial services, utility, and consumer product companies in the northeast and southeast United States The acquisition extended eGistics’ product offerings in key verticals and strengthened its position in the hosted document management market. eGistics provides much more than an archive.
It also provides a virtual platform underlying departmental and corporate functions to securely store, access and share electronic documents and information, based on customer-defined business logic.