Tuesday Feb 07

Posts Tagged ‘#disaster_recovery’

Got ECM?

Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO

Got ECM?

 

Remember when the “Got Milk?” advertising blitz began? The campaign cleverness and branding leverage created a spinoff advertising frenzy still alive today. We thought; why not apply the same concept to Enterprise Content Management (ECM)? Have you got ECM? If not, here’s why you should…

 

Make Sneakernet a thing of the past.

The invoice comes in. The data is entered. The copies are made. The inter-office envelopes are addressed. The paper-chase has begun! Are you kidding me? When speed, responsiveness and the currency on which business reach exponential growth, why are we putting up with this? Not only are our mundane work-flows primarily paper-based, so are our mission critical ones! This needs to be a thing of the past. GET ECM!

 

Reduce labor costs instantly.

No more employees going to the file cabinet, walking by the water cooler, talking the water cooler talk, forgetting where they’re going, walking back to their desk and then suddenly remembering what they were doing in the first place.

 

Provide immediate access to documents.

Wait no longer! In a time where information silos are no longer fashionable in a business environment, critical records must be available and accessible 24X7. All documents should be at your fingertips.

 

Eliminate time-consuming document filing and retrieval.

No more stacks on the desk to be filed and then reaching out to the intern to file your most sacred of documents because your full-time employees don’t have time to file.

 

Implement disaster recovery plan immediately.

Worry no longer about what you will do if there is a fire or a flood! Your documents are electronic now and are backed up as well. Your organization’s historical knowledge is protected.

 

Provide answers quickly!

“I’ll need to pull the file and call you back”, will be a saying of the past. Answering inquiries from customers, vendors, auditors are a snap when information is located in one place.

 

Email documents right from your computer.

No more searching through filing cabinets or email archives looking for the impossible needle in a haystack. Within seconds documents can be located and thereafter emailed in a few additional seconds.

 

Retire your copier and your courier.

There’s no reason to copy documents now! It’s all at your fingertips. You can send it electronically. And there’s certainly no reason to transport those hefty boxes anymore.

 

Sweat no longer necessary.

Don’t sweat the small stuff takes on a whole new meaning. No more lost of misfiled documents! You KNOW where your documents are and you can produce information at a moment’s notice.

 

Improve information sharing.

Sharing is no longer an option – it’s an expectation. People have access to the same information at the same time and even concurrently!

 

SAVE MONEY!

Putting a price tag on: labor-intensive manual processes, lack of information sharing, the lost and misfiled documents, the angst you experience when the auditor requests a document and you can’t find it, the copier and courier, the time you spend looking through your electronic files searching for the document you need, the employees who are sitting and waiting around for someone internally to track down a document, the bottle neck in one department in duplicating documents so others can have access, and those endless trips by the water cooler. It’s expensive. ECM is priceless.

 

Got ECM? How can you not?

Saving money sometimes takes creativity

Friday, March 19th, 2010 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO

Creative Cities Summit - April 7-9, 2010 - Creative City Confere

I was catching up on my reading this weekend when I happened across the February issue of Business Focus from Commerce Lexington . The cover boasted: “How do cities & businesses thrive in dire economic times? They get creative.”

If you haven’t read it yet, it’s announcing that Lexington will host the Creative Cities Summit from April 7-9 this year. Previously held in Detroit and St. Petersburg, Fla., it’s an international conference drawing speakers to discuss “savvy economic development.” Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear was quoted as saying: “The summit will provide an opportunity for collaborative brainstorming that will strengthen both cultural dynamics and offer economic solutions.”

That phrase “economic solutions” resonated with me, especially as Team VeBridge has been planning for the upcoming year in the face of some trying economic times here in the Bluegrass State. While some areas around the country are showing signs of rebounding from the latest economic crisis, our state government and our companies continue to broadcast woeful economic news.

In the face of businesses cutting back and losing revenue, friends and peers have asked me, “So, how’s business?” And interestingly enough, it’s in the tough times that demand for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions rise exponentially here at VeBridge. When companies are cutting, the paper shuffle they have to do doesn’t go away. Those companies have just as much paperwork with fewer resources to get it done.

That’s where ECM comes to the rescue. For those employees who are left with not enough resources to do the accounts payable paper shuffle or the human resources documents management, or the Manufacturing Safety Data Sheets compliance paperwork dance, an ECM system can streamline a company’s processes and its workflow. Shuffling paper is no longer necessary. An employees’ time is now driven by the workflow lever in the ECM system. There is no longer any worry about an employee’s silo. Anyone granted access can now review the documents associated with a company’s key knowledge.

And the best part? It doesn’t require capital expenditures. Organizations that opt for a hosted solution don’t have to shell out precious cash for new hardware, software and implementation services. They can simply pay as they go. And, at the same time, they are satisfying their disaster recovery and business continuity requirements. Talk about a strong ROI!

Along with all the creative thinking that will be arriving in our fair city in April, we’re also a creative solution. Consider it.

Don’t let disaster drive disaster recovery

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.

Human nature: We rebuild

Friday, January 15th, 2010 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO

Just one photo out of thousands coming out of Haiti right now.

The photo above shows the devastation Haiti is left with after an earthquake reaching 7.0 on the Richter scale ripped through the country on January 12.

After a 7.0 on the Richter scale, Haiti now has the entire world’s focus. We all watch, mourn and grieve for a country’s loss of 50,000 people with the death toll rising. We wonder how an entire country can rebuild after such disaster. That is human nature after all. For those who are left behind, life continues. Eventually, we pick ourselves up after our mourning, and we slowly begin the rebuilding process.

Did you know western Kentucky sits along a fault line? Did you know that the series of four earthquakes felt in 1811 and 1812, called the New Madrid Earthquakes, were felt over almost 50,000 square miles strongly, and across nearly 1 million square miles moderately? Experts believe that at least one of the earthquakes was around an 8.0 on the Richter scale, more than the Haiti earthquake. These earthquakes were so powerful that the Mississippi appeared to flow backward and new lakes were formed.

Disaster of this magnitude can strike here in the Bluegrass State and can affect those states contiguous to Kentucky.

As team VeBridge sits and watches the news coming out of Haiti and feels similar emotions that the entire world is feeling, we can’t help but wonder if the country had a disaster recovery plan. What about all the local businesses? Can the country’s banking industry rebuild and get moving after having all its disaster recovery plans in place? What about its hospitals? Are patient records recoverable?

Mother Nature. Acts of God. Acts of Man. This generation has seen them: this latest earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, 09/11, and the 2004 tsunami with a death toll of 227,898. That tsunami sparked from an underwater earthquake that registered 9.1 and 9.3 on the Richter scale and was the single largest tsunami on record.

We never really expect the disaster. When we work with organizations on their disaster recovery plans, it’s usually viewed as an exercise that must be completed to check off a task. Fortunately, we never have to internalize the human costs of the disasters. If we did, our absolute helplessness to preserve life as easily as we preserve data would be overwhelming.

Our hearts go out to the people of Haiti. We will feel their pain, but not as profoundly as they do.

Lost in the lingo

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!

What’s in a name?

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.

My company is a frog…

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO

bullfrogFrogs. 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…


Copyright © 2010 VeBridge. All Rights Reserved.
Toll Free: (877) 859-5222
Fax: (859) 514-1705
Contact Us 3101 Beaumont Centre Circle
Suite 160
Lexington, KY 40513