Tuesday, June 7th, 2011 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO
I used to love shopping with my dad. He was an uber-geek before it was fashionable. He would take me to the coolest stores; Sears hardware department, Radio Shack, and Tandy (when they sold electronics). My dad would ask the sales associate a question. Upon receiving the answer, he could sometimes be heard muttering, “another hammer looking for a nail!” One day I asked him to explain. He told me there was an old saying, “If all you have is a hammer, everything you see is a nail.” He further explained what would happen if you used a hammer to pound in a screw. Bad idea.
His point was some sales people couldn’t hear your question because they only knew how to sell what they had, and didn’t want to walk away from a sale. Half the time, we would walk out of the store without making a purchase, and my dad would confide that he saw exactly what he was looking for on the shelf, but he’d be darned if he would buy it from the “hammer salesman.”
We see this same behavior too often in the ECM world. The sales representative has a cloud solution, so that’s what the rep pitches. Or they have a scan/retrieve system with weak or no workflow. So that’s what the rep pitches.
I had a customer who was replacing their ill-fitting ECM system. He and I discussed the fact that he had bought his ECM from a hammer looking for a nail. He got it right away. Then he posed the big question. “How could I have known?” My answer was almost too simple for him to fathom. I answered, “The lack of discovery.”
Turns out the sales rep he had bought from scheduled a demo and slide show as their first meeting. Didn’t ask any questions. Just showed my future customer what he was selling and closed him. We went to the company’s web site and, lo and behold, they had only one product to sell.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not just a sales problem. There’s a buying problem here, too. I can’t tell you how many times we have received calls from buyers who want “a demo and proposal” for an ECM system. We explain that our first meeting is for discovery. Unless we understand what problems they are trying to solve, we can’t even guess what product, if any, is the right one.
The moral of this story is that ECM isn’t simple. Not all problems whose solution is ECM are the same. And not all business problems can be solved with ECM. If the company you are considering buying an ECM system from doesn’t insist on a fairly thorough discovery session prior to determining the direction they should take with respect to solutions, move on. You can’t afford to buy an ECM from a hammer looking for a nail.
If going green were as easy as clicking the red “Easy” button, we’d have all done it by now. With Earth Day quickly approaching, we are all motivated to find ways to conserve and preserve our world for many generations to come.In the work environment, where paper and other recyclable materials abound, we are constantly challenged to find ways to re-use materials. More and more employees and organizations alike are moving to a more paperless environment.
The statistics are staggering…
·An average office employee prints more than 10,000 pages per year
·Around $4 billion dollars are spent each year in the US to purchase 4 million tons of paper for business purposes
·The average employee prints 6 wasted pages per day – totaling 1,410 pages per year
·Over 400 billion pages are on file…92 billion are added annually
·Over 775 billion pages are generated annually by computers – what, seriously…why?
Sound overwhelming? Let’s simplify and make it easy. Think about what would result if every organization replaced just one paper-based business process. Just one. Rewards would be recognized from both an employee’s perspective as well as an organization’s perspective. Making work easier and steps repeatable, increasing employee satisfaction, eliminating cumbersome manual workarounds, and adding to the bottom line would be just a few benefits that could be readily achieved in this transition from paper to paperless.
Why wait? Pick a process, any manual, paper-intensive process, and automate today. Taking one step in the right direction toward a more paperless environment…it’s that easy. The earth thanks you.
Thursday, March 10th, 2011 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO
The bean counters seem to be leading the technology wave in Britain. The Accounts Payable folks are moving ahead with an attitude of Fish or Cut Bait!
In an article on www.accountingweb.com, the UK bean counters are swimming in a land with no paper.
“In a recent article on the site, practitioner Kevin Salter urged fellow accountants to ’hurry up and get on with it!’ Consultants Charles Verrier, Simon Hurst and Jon Milburn from ScanWorx have all made similar points in articles. Judging from the responses to the site’s paperless debates and our latest poll, AccountingWEB members have heeded the calls to ditch their filing cabinets and go electronic.”
The most interesting news is this: A survey sent to the British AP group revealed that one in seven respondents had first-hand electronic document management experience. Of those surveyed, 26% declared themselves totally committed to the paperless office.
Wow! And the best part: “…The UK accountancy profession has entered what industry analyst Gartner calls the ‘slope of enlightenment,’ a period of less widely trumpeted, but more commercially successful technology adoption.”
That’s not to say that the group didn’t have their negative feelings about ECM: 40% said paper would never be completely removed from accounting. To an extent, I think they are right. We as a group love paper. We love to touch it. It serves as reminders or markers. Many people prefer to read documents on paper and not on a screen.
What does this mean to us (US)? With the implementation of technology solutions encompassing workflow, organizations are now, more than ever, embracing the notion of a more paperless work environment. So, the days of paper as a driver of our work are coming to a close. In essence? Fish or cut bait.
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, 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.
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.
