Thursday, February 11th, 2010 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO
Being a financial guy, I love auditors. I’ve lived through audits, and I live for the day when the bean counters walk in my door…NOT. Since I’ve been in the business of Enterprise Content Management (see the ECM blog for a definition), I tell my customers I can make their auditors disappear.
Here’s why I love my auditor (and please don’t let the sarcastic tone in any way distract you from my message):
They enjoy full-fare flights - to and fro - which gets billed to me.
They eat in the finest restaurants - which gets billed to me.
They stay at the nicest hotels - which gets billed to me.
They take over my conference room - for which I have paid.
They make spontaneous demands on my accounting staff, which is already overworked - for which I pay.
They leave my files in total disarray, and sometimes they mingle content between my folders - which I have to pay someone to clean up.
And then they drink all my coffee - for which I pay.
I’m not the exception. They treat all their clients the same. No longer. Here’s what happens when companies install ECM.
For the auditors who insist on having a handoff of information, clients have the auditors send them a list of accounts that they intend to examine. In less than 10 minutes, clients conduct a search, export the results, burn those results to a CD and ship that CD to their auditor’s office via FedEx.
That’s compared to: going to the files, pulling the files, dropping a “pulled” card into their filing cabinets to mark where the file goes and where it is, boxing up the files and setting them on a conference room table to await their auditor’s arrival.
The auditors everyone loves to miss the most are the ones that allow a company to set up a user ID for the auditors to use remotely. The auditor then can access whatever records they need from the comfort of their own offices. If that strikes fear in your heart, let me just say, the document management systems we offer can limit an auditor’s access to documents. An auditor will only be able to view documents their client allows them to view. And then - on a daily basis - our customer’s document management system can email a report of the documents the auditor viewed, what the auditor printed, and how long the auditor was in the system.
Our clients have now eliminated any contact with their auditor, well, at least until they receive any follow-up questions.
Thursday, January 28th, 2010 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO
These are just a few of the PepsiCo's products in its vast trunk of products. A judge recently handed a $1.26-billion judgment after PepsiCo's attorneys were a no-show in court. Attorneys didn't know to show for the court appearance because a document notifying the titan of the suit's filing was lost. The document would not have been lost had the juggernaut installed an Enterprise Content Management system.
There are so many ways I can begin this blog.
A: Save $1.26 billion in business today.
B: $1.26 billion, Pepsi and the lost paper – what they have in common.
C: An ROI of 1,260,000,000%!
In this economy when businesses around the world are trying to hold on to their bottom line and are faced with laying off employees, how would you like to learn there’s been a $1.26 BILLION-dollar judgment against you, and you didn’t even show up in court to defend yourself?
That’s exactly what happened to Pepsi. We’re not talking about your local bottler or distribution center. We’re talking Pepsi Corporate – the owners of grocery giants like Tropicana, Frito-Lay, Gatorade and Quaker.
So here’s the skinny. Charles Joyce and James Voigt filed a lawsuit against PepsiCo, Inc. in April of 2009 alleging that the conglomerate had stolen their intellectual property – their idea of bottling and selling purified water. The alleged “theft” happened after a conversation occurred during discussions dating back to 1981. A letter notifying the soft drink titan of the suit was delivered to PepsiCo’s law department on Sept. 15.
Once routed to the corporate law office, a funny thing happened. (It was NOT funny “ha ha.”)
A PepsiCo employee put the letter aside to prepare for a board meeting. That critical piece of paper was never forwarded for action. I have no idea what happened to that critical correspondence. What I do know, though, is that PepsiCo attorneys were a no-show for the Oct. 5 court appearance. The Wisconsin judge banged his gavel resulting in a $1.26 billion default judgment.
What a pickle. Imagine how much cheaper it would have been if Pepsi had set up a workflow enabled ECM system. This is my ending to this story.
That document would have been scanned at the mail room or by someone with whom Pepsi contracts. The document preparation team would have opened the mail, scanned it into the system and indexed it as a legal notice. The letter would have entered a workflow, which would have routed it to the appropriate person or pool of people. If someone had not taken action within the required timeframe, notices would have been sent to other people who then would have intervened to make sure this letter did NOT fall through the cracks.
With my ending, PepsiCo could have saved itself a mint.
Well, gotta run, I’m gearing up for some cold calls into PepsiCo. I have an ROI I’d like to share with them.
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO
As disaster aid workers try to land on Haitian airstrips covered in rubble, and as international aid tries to figure out the best approach to getting aid to the disaster-stricken country, the world is mired in disaster and catastrophe. As we have watched, we also wonder. An article about Tulane University and the effects it felt from Hurricane Katrina, which was the sixth strongest hurricane on record, popped up in a Google search in one of our wondering moments.
The article was written on Aug. 5, 2009, significantly after the initial August 2005 hurricane. Tulane University, located in New Orleans, had closed only once before in its 170-year history, and that was during the Civil War. Before Katrina, the university was imaging all its files for “tactical business use,” as the article will state, but each department or college was left to decide its own fate for its own internal and student documents.
No longer. After Katrina, the thought of digitizing documents drastically changed. The university put an Enterprise Content Management System into place across the entire university. The barriers to digitizing records broke in the face of the disaster that faced the entire city and this University.
The article demonstrates how disaster can affect institutional thinking.
Here is an excerpt of the article. The link is below.
Enterprise content management a player in disaster recovery program
By Linda Tucci, Senior News Writer
05 Aug 2009 | SearchCIO-Midmarket.com
“For all the talk about living in a digital age, paper content, from account invoices and HR records to intellectual property, still fuels the business processes of many organizations, even those with sophisticated IT systems. But quick recovery of paper content — a fragile medium in fire and flood — is often an afterthought in disaster recovery and business continuity planning. An enterprise content management system, the modern-day descendant of tactical document imaging tools, can act as a safety net in a disaster and even play a strategic role in a disaster recovery program…”
Click here to go to the article.
Thursday, January 14th, 2010 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO
No, it’s not a radio station, but stay tuned.
Don’t you hate sales people who think their job is to “sell?” You know you’ve got one within minutes of their mouths starting to move. The biggest hint is that there are no question marks. There’s just techno-babble. I admit that most of my visits with sales people last under five minutes. I just don’t have the patience.
I think the root of it is that they want to impress me with their product knowledge. Maybe it’s just an ego thing.
It takes a special, egoless sales rep to get me excited. They have that strange combination of industry knowledge and the ability to act as if this is the first time they’ve heard my problems. They spend 10% of our time together asking questions, and I spend the rest of the time answering. They skillfully extract the problems I’m having, even those hidden from myself.
My theory is that they can do this because they employ WIIFM. (The “What’s in it for me” tool.) What differentiates them from the losers is that the “me” in their quest isn’t THEM! It’s ME. How else could they ask the questions they ask? How else could they find the pithy truth that will drive me to spend money to solve a problem? They can do these things because, before they even walk through my door, they have put themselves in my shoes and thought about the investment of my time I’m about to make in them. And they wonder to themselves, “If I was him, what would be in this for me?” And, presto, they are able to drive a powerful problem-solving session rather than a feature recital.
I admire people who show their respect for me by asking WIIFM. I model my behavior after these WIIFM practitioners. At VeBridge, we apply WIIFM at our sales meetings, when we are planning kickoffs, and any time we are contemplating a meeting with a prospect or client. It makes our job easier. The people with whom we meet sense our respect for them and their time. What’s even better is that they tell us their problems. We then make intelligent recommendations to them about the best product for their organization to solve their document management problems.
The bottom line – it’s so much easier for us to solve their problems if we know what they are and if we understand their WIIFM.
Friday, January 8th, 2010 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO
You know those moments. You’re at a party, you’ve just met someone, and they’re trying to explain what they do in their 30-second elevator speech. Somewhere in their explanation, they get lost in their own jargon, their own language, their own alphabet soup – acronyms for their programs. Then you start looking around the room trying to figure out who else you want to speak to or meet.
When team VeBridge talks to people with a problem we are trying to solve, we make sure we don’t get lost in the language of document management, enterprise content management systems, imaging services, litigation support and electronic document discovery. When you’ve been doing this as long as we have, your everyday language changes as your brain starts to adopt the words you use as the norm. Finally, you are talking a lingo that only you understand. The listener is not nodding their head because they agree, they just don’t want to hurt your feelings. To successfully communicate, we know that we have to painting a picture in terms that lay people can understand. It’s not always as easy as it looks.
So, when we find others within our industry that find a good way to communicate our passion and deliver that “aha” moment, we feel obliged to pass it along.
Hyland Software, one of our partners, has a great video that helps explain that dragon-of-a-phrase – Enterprise Content Management. It gave us a good chuckle. Enjoy!
Thursday, January 7th, 2010 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO
VeBridge? What does it mean and what does it stand for? We get those questions often enough that I think it bears a little explaining. It’s not like your typical intuitive business name…like Bob’s Transmission.
Once upon a time, we were known by another name. We started as a simple imaging service bureau, outsourcing document imaging for our clients. As our clients’ needs grew and our market matured, we grew along with it. In time, we became nationally recognized experts in document/content management and were being sought out as a trusted advisor. It was time for a name change. And the rebranding began.
In January 2006, we began the process of coming up with a new name to reflect all that we did. By this time, we provided not only internal document imaging, but software and hardware for companies to do the same internally. We added litigation support services – managing paper evidence electronically rather than on paper. We also added electronic document discovery – managing emails, pdf files, forms, etc. along with paper evidence for civil or criminal proceedings.
With the help of both a website and marketing firm, we began the exercise of renaming our organization. We went through lots of cool brainstorming exercises. After those exercises, my staff and I honed in on one word – bridge. We wanted to be a bridge for people and their documents, all kinds of documents, so we wouldn’t be tied down to any one particular field, like healthcare or banking. We did it all, so our name needed to reflect that.Then came the “V” – our bridge was in a virtual or electronic environment.
We began researching business names and internet domains that weren’t already in use. After doing that, we realized that we needed to add just a bit more. Then came our “e” – we weren’t a physical bridge, we were an e-bridge.
Thus, VeBridge was born. We bought up the internet domains, trademarked the name, added some purple and green because we liked the colors, and in four months, we had our rebranding campaign. On April 1, 2006, VeBridge entered the world. I didn’t pass out cigars or send out balloons, but it has certainly been an exciting ride ever since.
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO
Frogs. Those of us in business don’t think very often about this particular species of animal. Most of us are focused on higher planes and more abstract thoughts and whatever particular widget we’re producing. We should instead be focused on this amazing amphibian – any company worth its weight should be like a frog.
It’s kind of like that scene in Jerry McGuire. Jerry is talking to the cute kid and they’re battling it out for who can say some crazy factoid the quickest and have the other react. Like: “D’you know that the human head weighs 8 pounds? Did you know that Troy Aikman, in only six years, has passed for 16,303 yards?” Stay with me here.
The frog is the only animal that can’t go backwards.
Now we could apply this particular froggy trait to our lives personally, but that’s for another time and another place. Think about it in terms of your business. Is your business only moving forward? Is it headed into the next century with zeal, technology and profits? Is your team moving forward together? What about your best business practices? Are they the best they can be and forward-bound? Have you analyzed the efficiency of your organization to know what can be cut to protect your bottom line – all in that linear move ahead? We’re talking about not running around in circles or taking steps backwards.
We meet with lots of business people who tell us how they have started their move toward a paperless environment, scanning in an effort to drive their business forward. They know we will want to know…’cause, shucks, that’s all we really care about! They tell us about the cool multi-function sales guy who came by and told them how this technology will solve all their problems. They tell us about how excited everyone was to get this great technology. They tell us how lines formed around the machines for the first couple of weeks as people scanned until they had blisters on their fingers. Then they tell us they all kind of feel like they just took a step backwards!
They tell stories about users not being able to find what they scanned. They give us scenarios of the types of searches they have realized they need to do but can’t. They wonder, incredulously, why they did better with their file cabinets.
We smile our best smiles as we explain that embracing a new technology does not necessarily move you forward. We tell them that scanning is to document management as pressing a brake pedal is to driving . It is critical to your success, but worthless in isolation. We explain underlying databases, Boolean search and date-range searches. We excitedly paint a picture of retention management and email management. We watch as the light goes on. THEY GET IT! They frown. They ponder their plight. They realize…they are NOT a frog. And then the work begins…
Frogs. Those of us in business don’t think very often about this particular species of animal. Most of us are focused on higher planes and more abstract thoughts and whatever particular widget we’re producing.