Friday, September 9th, 2011 by Elizabeth Lucas, VeBridge Vice President of Strategic Markets
There are two certainties in life, as the saying goes, death and taxes. To this list, there should be added a third…change. When recently approached to speak at a national conference later this month regarding managing change, I jumped at the chance. Why? Because change is the essence of our culture. With a prevalent and systemic attitude of get on board or get out of my way, change permeates every facet of our lives.
At VeBridge, change came home in August. We said goodbye to Tom Musgrave, hello to Rob Gower, and anxiously anticipate a move to a new location.
After a decade with VeBridge Tom, a senior account executive, retired. With a promise to spend more time with his family, (particularly his grandson), hit the links, and enjoy volunteer work, Tom is welcoming his new found free time. He left his legacy here at VeBridge touching more than half of our 230 customers. We wish him every happiness as he embarks on his new journey enjoying the change it brings to his life.
As we say goodbye to one employee, another receives greetings. Rob Gower joined VeBridge on August 29th. With nine years of marketing and sales experience, Rob brings a wealth of knowledge to his new role as the Strategic Markets Manager. You may recognize his name as he spent time working with the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce. A Lexington resident, Rob, and his new wife Jess, spend their free time working with the Mercer County Band and Color Guard. So, if you’re at a football game or a band competition this fall and Mercer County is playing, you’re likely to see Rob! We extend a warm welcome to Rob and know he will add instant value to our team and to our customers.
Last, but not least, VeBridge is moving! After almost 10 years in our downtown location, we have outgrown our space! We are planning, coordinating, and fretting…mostly planning. Our estimated date of arrival in our new location is the end of October. Change is definitely upon us! Where are we moving? Would you like to guess? Send your best guess to info@vebridge.com. All correct responses received by September 15thwill be eligible for a drawing to receive an iPad! (A hint: “Nay, it’s not downtown!”)
The third certainty in life, change, is sometimes scary, sometimes exciting, and sometimes somewhat daunting. We hope you join us in celebrating the changes we’re making at Team VeBridge to better serve our customers and our community.
Monday, May 3rd, 2010 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO
Elizabeth Lucas
Like anyone else, Team VeBridge gets really excited when our family is promoted and grows.
We are excited to make two announcements. First, Director of Litigation Support Services Elizabeth Lucas is now Vice President of Strategic Markets. Congratulations, to Beth!
Our family has grown by one. We have added a new position to help serve our clients better. Bill McGrath will focus on service delivery as our Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Implementation Consultant. Welcome, Bill!
Here’s a little from the press release:
Lucas, formerly VeBridge Account Manager and a General Manager of Consulting and Education for Fortune 500 company ACS, brings more than 20 years of court-related consulting, business workflow, education and training experience to the position. She will manage marketing/sales initiatives and personnel. Lucas received her bachelor’s in History from Transylvania University (Lexington) and earned a master’s in Communications from the University of Kentucky.
McGrath brings more than 12 years of project management, implementation delivery, contract administration and consulting services to VeBridge. He is formerly a project manager responsible for implementations for Fortune 500 company ACS. McGrath will spearhead technical services in the ECM space. He received his bachelor’s from Transylvania University. In 2007, he earned his Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute.
Friday, March 19th, 2010 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO
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.
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.
Friday, January 15th, 2010 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO
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.
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.