EDMS, BPMS, ECMS, and others. Which system to choose?

Today everyone is talking about digitalization. Companies that are starting this journey are tormented by the variety of options. Will deploying a document management system become a growth point, a competitive advantage, or a waste of money? You will find the answers to these questions in the article below.

Which system to choose?

All vendors claim their system has the richest functionality. Still, if a company has decided to digitalize business processes, the first step should be defining principle goals to achieve; these might be:

• optimizing document management through processing and registration of incoming letters, task assignment and control, and document search;
• effectively distributing resources through switching from physical documents to electronic document management;
• organizing electronic document archive by constructing a storage system for legally valid electronic and paper documents;
• digitalization of business processes and effective management of workflows in various departments;
• switching to the electronic document management in order to create, approve and regulate documents in a company digitally.

The next step is to choose a type of system. Depending on the goals, it can be BPMS (Business Process Management System), ECMS (Enterprise Content Management System), ERPS (Enterprise Resource Planning System), or CRMS (Customer Relationship Management System), and the list is far from complete.

In fact, this classification is mostly outdated. For the last several years, various systems have been combining features of different system types, which further complicates the situation. Meanwhile, it doesn’t matter to companies which formal type a certain system belongs to. What does is a true effect they get from system deployment and the amount of time spent on this transformation.

To return investments faster, a company can choose ready-to-use business solutions capable of managing both processes (together with accompanying data) and documents (contracts, invoices, etc.).

Whichever system you decide to implement, make sure it has all necessary features to organize your company’s work in a digital environment, including business processes and corporate content.